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My Personal & Business Productivity Tools

Here’s my most important 3 Productivity Tools for personal and business use:

1. PDA phone. This is one productivity tool that worth the most to invest in. It connects me to my business, friends

   

   and families. It takes care of all my schedules, contacts, my business and personal notes, etc. Due to my short memory, I use it to do our my memorization for me like the details of my consulting and coaching work so that I remember where I left off in the last session.

2. Dell notebook. It really gives me the freedom to work in anywhere in the world, especially with wi-fi broadband facility become so common now. Therefore I can free myself from an office or a cubicle. Like right now, I’m actually working through my notebook in Hanoi, Vietnam.

   

3. MP3 or MP4 player. I has bought a MP3 player like Ipod. and it really help improve my productivity. Due to my high frequency of traveling and with the current high frequency of flights delay in airport and highly unproductive time waiting for my flights, this MP3 player really help me in improving myself. I put a lot of my motivational audio into this small MP3 players and “Taa Daa” I am working on my personal Kaizen (continuous improvement).

Is Entrepreneurs Crazy?

Anita Roddick, Activist & Founder of The Body Shop once said“There is a fine line between an entrepreneur and a crazy person. Crazy people see things that others don’t. What seems to differentiate the entrepreneur from the crazy person is that the former gets other people to believe in his vision.”

Many people dream of becoming an entrepreneur but they are not willing to be “carzy”. What I mean here is to think and act differently from the majority. Just like Anita Roddick has mentioned in her quote above that what differentiate a crazy person and a good entrepreneur is that an entrepreneur can convince other people to follow his/ her vision and take action to make that vision comes true.

So for your budding entrepreneurs, now start thinking “What can I do differently to help my clients achieve their goals?”.

Is Lean Management for Everyone?

Is Lean Management suitable for your organization? I have done so many Lean implementation for different companies coming from different industry in both manufacturing & service, and I can say that they are successfully implemented & also help these companies to perform better. But, for Lean to really successful, the most important factor is that the top management of the management understand the potentials of Lean and work with his teams to implement Lean.

I have one CEO that involves himself in driving Lean in his organization and with his effort his organization is able to really transform itself. Within a short period of time (less than 2 weeks), the company has already enjoying improvement and also staff performance improvement.

A lot of people just consider Lean as a set of tools and forget the real objectives of Lean. Taiichi Ohno, who is one of the key driver of developing Toyota Production System (TPS), said “All we are doing is looking at the time line from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point whenwe collect the cash. And we are reducing that time line by removing the non-value-added wastes.” This is the real purpose of Lean.

Computer Gamer – A Career?

Can playing computer games be a full time career? In Korea, playing computer games is not only a hobby but a big career. Gamers are trained like a sports players for long hours every day & compete frequently with other teams. The competition is normally held in a stadium where fans can watch their favorite team or players playing just like watching a music concert. Check out http://bbcworld.com/click.

Today any hobbies can be turned into a job or career. Think about it.

Apple iPhone is On Sale Now!

Finally the Apple iPhone is on sale. There’s a few more hours before the store opens but there are already so many people queuing up in front of the New York Apple store to purchase the new Apple iPhone. What can we learn from Apple?

First, Apple is doesn’t create a whole new hi-tech product that normally requires a lot of education and advertising. However, they always ride on the trend, such as the iPod which is not the first mp3 portable music players, and create a product that the customers would desire to have through their design and intuitive interface and features.

Secondly, they are able to create a whole set of back-end products such as selling music and now videos through their iTune which gives lots of profits.

I believe there are a lot more we can learn from Apple but for me these are 2 good learnings that I do learn from Apple and now thinking how I can model these learning onto my business. If you have any additional tips or ideas, please do comment. Thanks.

Why Toyota is So Successful?

While reviewing my Lean Management talk in Mauritius for Africa expo tomorrow on How do we model the success of Toyota. There are 4Ps that have been emphasized by Toyota but when others try to learn from Toyota they merely see the surface of implementing their process improvement & problem solving tools without realize the importance of the other 2Ps which are people & philosophy which are the driving forces behind Toyota’s success. You can read about the details in The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker.

A Lean Nation/ Country

It’s been almost 7 months since I last visited Mauritius. I just can’t wait to be able to meet my friends over there. This is a nation that has previously embark on Gemba Kaizen journey and since last year I have been working with one of the government body to promote Lean Management to all the enterprises in Mauritius.

On 29 Jun 2007, this Friday, I’ll be presenting Lean to not only Mauritian but also enterprises from other African nation. I am really proud that the government realize the importance of getting the enterprises in this country lean so that they can gain the competitive edge over other nations. And, I believe Mauritius is the first nation that is embarking on becoming a Lean Nation.

I am delighted to be able to work with this nation to get them to be more productive and at the same time enjoy the beautiful Mauritius island. Here’s the photo I took from Flic En Flac, one of the nicest beach that I love. By the way, if any of you interested in visit Mauritius, I have a good friend who always take me around the island to show you beautiful beaches, waterfalls, good restaurants and many, please write to me at acheah@yahoo.com so that I can recommend him to you. Check out the beautiful Mauritius beach picture that I took.

If you like to know more on the work that I have done in Mauritius, you can refer to http://leanadvisors.com/Lean/articles/sofap.cfm .

Welcome to the Business Improvement Tips and Ideas Blog!

Welcome to Business Improvement Tips and Ideas Blog! The purpose of this blog is to share my ideas and tips mainly from my consulting experience so that we, from the management field, can learn from each other to improve ourselves, businesses, management and companies.

Due to my extensive traveling, I’ll try to do my best to update this blog and also due to my expertise in Lean Management or Lean Manufacturing so I’ll be sharing a lot of topic related to that which I’ve personally seen Lean works for a lot of organizations. If any of you have something related to leadership, management or business improvement, please do not hesitate to share or give your comments. With this, we will make this blog a better place or a reference point to help us improve ourselves. Thanks.