Happy Christmas from Ley Hill Solutions

This is a top quality residential course based near Milton Keynes. Full details were provided in our October Newsletter, but if you missed it, follow this link to our website for more information and to download the booking form, which includes instructions on how to book, payment methods accepted and terms and conditions of boking.

Bookings will be consideredto be on a provisional basis only until full payment has been received.

Did you know?

US scientists have calculated that, travelling at 650 miles per second,
Santa would have to visit 822 homes per second to deliver presents to all the world on Christmas Eve.

Think about it!!

A rich man's son was kidnapped. The ransom note told him to bring a valuable diamond to a phone booth in the middle of a public park. Plainclothes police officers surrounded the park, intending to follow the criminal or his messenger.

The rich man arrived at the phone booth and followed instructions but the police were powerless to prevent the diamond from leaving the park and reaching the crafty villain.

How did the kidnaper get away with the valuable diamond?

Answer at the bottom of this column

Featured Tool

Venn Diagrams

Venn diagrams or set diagrams, conceived around 1880 by John Venn and normally comprised of overlapping circles, are commonly used in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics and computer science. Each circle represents a set of things possessing one property (e.g. wood) and includes all things with that property. Where circles overlap, the area within the overlap represents things with all the properties of the overlapping sets e.g. in a two-set Venn diagram, one circle may represent the set of all wooden objects, while another circle may represent the set of all tables. The overlapping area would then represent the set of all wooden tables.

Numerical data can be added to the circles to show how many things there are with each property, but one of the benefits of Venn diagrams is that they can be used in the absence of numerical data to help sort, sift and clarify information and ideas e.g. you could categorize all potential solutions to a problem according to which aspects of the problem they address and then find out, by seeing where most circles overlap, which solutions address all or most aspects of the problem.

The theoretical seasonal Venn diagram below would help clarify that Santa is the only being who has great power and great responsibility, knows if you have been naughty or nice and wears a red suit.

Christmas venn

Expert Interview

Are there some aspects of your organization that you would like to improve, but you are not exactly sure how you need to go about doing this? Or do you need to introduce nationally and/ or internationally recognized standards in some parts of your organization - e.g. people management, environmental standards, health and safety - and you are not sure which standard is most appropriate?

Perhaps you would like some expert help and advice to identify what exactly it is that you need?

Our Expert Interview tool is designed to give you just that.

By following this link and answering a few very simple questions, our Expert Interview will guide you to the right solution.

Online Excellence Calculator

Would you like to see how your organization might perform if assessed against the EFQM Excellence Model?

There are many types of self-assessment available to organizations wishing to benefit from this widely used excellence framework.

Experience just one of them by following this link and completing a ten minute, matrix based, assessment of the level of excellence of your organization.

Think about it!!

Answer

This is a true story which happened in Taiwan.

When the rich man reached the phone booth he found a carrier pigeon in a cage. It had a message attached telling the man to put the diamond in a small bag which was around the pigeon's neck and to release the bird.

When the man did this the police were powerless to follow the bird as it returned across the city to its owner.

Newsletter Archive

To view our previous newsletters in our archive please click the link above

If you found this issue interesting and believe a friend or colleague would find the articles useful please click on the button above to send it to them.

Newsletter - December 2011

_________________________________

Greetings!

In our last issue we brought you news of the 2011 UK Excellence Award Ceremony hosted by the British Quality Foundation (BQF). The Awards are given for various categories of excellence, based on assessment against the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model. With the New Year fast approaching, now is the time to start thinking about applying for the 2012 awards. See our article below on the benefits of this and how it can improve organizational performance and boost employee morale, key issues in today's harsh economic climate. As I have said before, we at ley hill solutions have a tradition of supporting the Awards each year by providing a number of experienced lead assessors and contributing to the development of the assessment process. Rigorous standards for the recruitment and training of assessors are laid down by the EFQM, to whom the BQF are affiliated, and we are proud to say that we now have the largest number of Master Assessors of any company in the UK and possibly in Europe - see below for more details.

This month we also have the last in our Quality Guru series - Tom Peters, world renowned for his approach to leadership. There may well be many other management gurus important to quality management, but we have tried to include all those whose reputation is primarily for their work in quality and excellence. If however, you feel we have left anyone out whose ideas are worth sharing, then do let us know and we may well include an article about them in a future Newsletter. I hope you have found our Quality Guru series interesting and thought provoking, especially if you are on, or continuing along, a quality journey within your organization. However, as well as having many common features between the gurus' approaches, there are some contradictions and it is crucial that the approach you take is purpose built and tailored to suit your organization and its current and future needs. The holistic nature of the EFQM Excellence Model can help with this, as well as it being the model used for the UK Excellence Awards just mentioned.

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Alan Taylor, who has recently joined our team and is an expert on business continuity, emergency planning and and crisis management, with a wealth of experience in the construction, property management and retail centre support industries. Alan has led crisis response teams for incidents such as the 7/7 London bombings and the airspace closures following the Icelandic volcanic eruption. For more information about Alan and his specialist skills follow this link.

I would also like to wish you a happy and relaxing break over the festive season and every possible success in 2012.

Why enter the UK Excellence Awards?

Entering awards is a great way to promote your products or services, offering independent endorsement of achievements and recognition of your efforts. There are of course many industry specific awards, but awards such as the UK Excellence Awards are designed to encourage and recognise a wide range of businesses that are performing at the very top of their capability.

Reasons to enter

Opportunity to document and publicize success

The process of entering can be affirming and motivating. When forging ahead with the day-to-day challenges of running your business it is easy to lose sight of successes. Capturing and articulating these means you can:

replicate success in the future
use the material you have produced to help promote your products or services

In addition, the BQF will do its best to maximise the media coverage for this event and its participants. You will be able to take advantage of these publicity opportunities during the run up to the Awards and announcement of the winners e.g. by including links to online publicity in customer emails

Boosts employee morale

Entering a competition is an unbeatable team-building experience. Shared moments of excitement build strong bonds. So do shared moments of defeat and mutual commiseration. Feelings of disappointment may be strong, but by offering support and encouragement in the event that you do not win and by underlining how important it was to enter and how proud everyone should be of the efforts they have made, even a non winning entry can result in very motivating effects and build strong team bonds. Winning also brings great opportunities for team and individual celebration and recognition.

Networking

The UK Excellence Award ceremony is attended by hundreds of people from some of the best performing companies in the UK. Many are large household names, but there will be smaller businesses there too and people from the public and not-for-profit sectors, providing excellent business networking opportunities.

Feedback

You may need to enter more than once before you win, but whether you win or not you will get expert feedback from the assessment process that will help you identify your key strengths and weaknesses and provide a focus for improvement that can be very beneficial in enhancing your organization's performance. You will also get the opportunity to listen to presentations from all the winners that can be used as a lesson in excellence.

To find out more about the Awards, including details of how to enter for 2012, follow this link.

ley hill solutions people become Master Assessors for assessments against the EFQM Excellence Model

Last month three of our people - Andrew Penn, Tom McCormick and myself - underwent the EFQM's Master Assessor Training. This is training specially designed for experienced assessors who can lead teams and is aimed at extending their competencies, particularly in relation to providing forward-looking feedback on the strategic and operational positioning of organizations they assess.

One of the most valuable aspects of the course, we found, was the chance to share knowledge and experience with other experienced assessors. Our people were already very practiced lead assessors, but we have all found this has given us an even greater depth of knowledge and enhanced our existing competencies.

It is no small testament to our belief in the Excellence Model as one of the very best (if not the best) tools for holistically managing and improving performance in all aspects of an organization, that we now certainly have the largest number of trained Master Assessors of any organization in the UK and probably of any organization in Europe.

Here is a picture of some of us on the training course.

Quality Guru Series
11. Tom Peters

Thomas J. (Tom) Peters was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1942. After gaining a degree in civil engineering in 1965, he later studied business at Stanford Business School.

From 1966 to 1970, he was in the United States Navy and served in Vietnam, later working in the Pentagon and then from 1973 to 1974 in the White House as a senior drug-abuse advisor during the Nixon administration. He has since acknowledged the influence of military strategist Colonel John Boyd on his later writing.

However, he is best known for his work on leadership, which he defined as being central to the quality improvement process, discarding the word "Management" for "Leadership" and defining the role of a leader, rather than manager, as one of a facilitator rather than a boss. He came up with the concept of "Managing by walking about" (MBWA), enabling the leader to keep in touch with customers, innovation and people, the three main areas in the pursuit of excellence. MBWA has since been also referred to as management by wandering about or management by walking around and involves managers consistently reserving time to walk through their departments and/or to be available for impromptu discussions, frequently going together with an open-door management policy. Tom Peters believes that, as the effective leader walks, at least 3 major activities are happening which are critical in getting the best possible performance from people:

Listening - suggests caring
Teaching - values are transmitted
Facilitating - able to give on-the-spot help

From 1974 to 1981 Tom Peters worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. It was there that he and Robert Waterman researched successful American organizations and developed the McKinsey 7S framework, which is still widely used today. Its basic premise is that there are seven internal aspects of any organization that are completely interdependent and need to be properly aligned if the organization is to be successful.

Some aspects are defined as "hard" (strategy, structure, systems), being more tangible and therefore easier to focus on, while others are categorized as "soft" (shared values, skills, style, staff), being more influenced by culture and harder to manage, so that in some organizations they are hardly managed at all. However, these soft elements are as important as the hard elements if the organization is going to be successful.

The McIKinsey 7S Framework

He left McKinsey to become an independent consultant. His book In Search of Excellence, jointly written with Robert Waterman, was published in 1982 and became a bestseller, His ideas have always been very popular in the UK and in 1990 he was honoured by the British Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) as one of the world's Quality Gurus. He is still working in the field of leadership, excellence and organizational success, now with his own company.

To find out more about him and his ideas and to access free learning materials about these, click here.

ley hill solutions aims to be one of Europe's most innovative consultancy organisations specialising in the tools and methods to improve the way your business works and performs. We use internationally recognised standards and frameworks such as ISO9001 and the EFQM Excellence Model to develop solutions that are right for your business.

Please contact us at ley hill solutions if we can be of any assistance.

Sincerely,

Graham Hull
ley hill solutions limited

The information provided in this newsletter and on our website is as correct and up to date as we can make it. no warranty, express or implied, is given regarding its accuracy. We do not accept any liability for errors or omissions. We shall not be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, damage for loss of business or loss of profits) arising from the use of, or inability to use, this site or any information contained it it, or from any action or decision taken as a result of using this site, or any such information.