Management Meditations
on Leadership, Learning and Culture
For those implementing change management, lean leadership, and the essential skills of managing people, teams and processes in today’s workplace. We provide online learning reinforced by one-on-one and team coaching to support your continuous improvement.
Please see both my own course platform Leadership-Academy.Online and my courses on Udemy.
Over 400,000 students have enrolled in our courses in more than 195 countries.
On Change Management – “Valuable content, delivered by a very experienced professional. Successful change management doesn’t happen by accident. This course has explored a structure along with the techniques required to adapt and change with increased success. Lots of common sense applied and that makes sense to me. Should be mandatory learning in every dynamic organization that wants to remain relevant in a sea of constant change.” Peter Rowan
Searching a best course for Team Leadership ends here. “Awesome! Lawrence Miller is a Highly experienced author, created topics in a very systematic manner and providing his stories of experience from Industry. Very colorful and meaningful slides once we start the course we never feel to miss any of his lectures. Thanks a lot!!
“Its just fascinating. Every second, every minute. I’m learning so much. It’s opening my eyes to so many things! Larry is just great. The way he explains things, the examples he uses, his speech, well¦ Everything is just marvelous. I loved and enjoyed every second of this course, and I’m gonna make the best of it. THANK YOU.”
“To me this is an exceptional piece of coaching which is very well presented. Very clear communication which is easy to understand as examples are numerous to get to the main point. Deep diving is done to prepare the course and practical examples are given which is close to day to day operations in any business. Hani Ul Nasir
Featured Courses
High Performance Teams, Lean Culture, Leadership, and Management Skills
From Business Thought Leader & Change Management Expert
Our instructor is Lawrence M. Miller with fifty years of experience implementing lean management, high performance teams, and creating more participative company cultures. He is author of eleven books on business management, and creator of sixteen online training courses that have seen enrollments of more than 400,000 students.
Recent Blog Posts
The Lean System of Motivation
One aspect of lean that has not been given enough attention, in my opinion, is how lean is an organization wide system of motivation that creates a high performance culture. Too many lean implementations suffer from a focus on problem solving skills, but a failure to attend to the system or culture of motivation. Too many rely on the “they oughtta wanna” assumption which usually results in disappointment.
A highly motivated work force is not an accident. It is not the result of being in one part of the country or another, have having a union or non-union. It is the result of systematic efforts on the part of management to design and improve a system of motivation. The most effective systems optimize both an ennobling purpose, the social bonds of strong teamwork, and the availability of individual incentives. They all contribute unique elements to a holistic system of motivation.
Abraham, Isaac, and the Ethics of Followership
In this post I would like to discuss the cultural root of obedience in the great church of our organizations and how we need to rethink the assumptions of loyal followership. Or to put it another way, a bit more disloyalty may be advantageous to the leader’s reputation and bank account.
Governor Christie and How the CEO’s Fingerprints Came to Appear on the Knife Planted in his Back
Every CEO or leader owns the behavior of his senior team. The challenge for every leader is to gain understanding of how one’s own behavior influences subordinates, and how their behavior in turn, may result in the unforeseen knife flying through the air to land in one’s own back.
Social Capital: Families and Teams Form the Social Capital of Our Culture
Healthy families in which there is high trust result in high academic performance. This is “family social capital.” Similarly, the team at the first level is the foundation of social capital in the organization. This social capital is a key factor in generating continuous improvement and achieving high job satisfaction and retention of employees.
New Year’s Wishes for All Leaders – Corporate and Country
Two years ago I published what I thought would be worthy New Year's resolutions for managers. Below I am both repeating some of those and adding a few new thoughts. I hope they are worthy of your consideration. You might want to challenge your management team to agree...
Leadership Lessons from the Obamacare Crisis
In my opinion, it is obvious that the current state of our healthcare system is unacceptable and it is equally obvious that the way the new law has been implemented has been unacceptably clumsy.
The question I want to address is what are the lessons one can learn from this mess and if you were the CEO of this organization what would you do differently? My thoughts follow.
Leading Change: Nine Keys to Success
There are plenty of books that hold up Toyota or other great companies as a model and essentially say “Be like that!” But for many companies this is a bit like holding up a picture of a bare chested Arnold Schwarzenegger or a bikini clad model and saying “There it is. Be like that!” It should only be so easy. Having a model of a great culture or great body is fine, but getting there is something entirely different. Here are nine keys to successfully leading change.
George Washington, Unity and the Spirit of Party
We need to have a serious conversation, not simply about the budget or the healthcare law, all of which can be improved, but about the unity of the country and the spirit of party about which we were well warned in the infancy of this nation. Washington was passionate about this one principle of unity and he could see that the greatest threat to our country was not external forces, but internal division. He could see that division would lead to “parties” and those parties would develop a spirit that would be a cancer to the country.
Leadership from the Senior Management Team: What Do They Do, Anyway!
As companies implement lean management the responsibility of leaders is critical to successful change management. All significant change in the culture of the organization requires strong and dynamic leadership and this must come from not only the single leader, but the leadership team as a cohesive model for the organization.
The Intuitive Lean of Steve Jobs
When we think of lean our mind first goes to the workings of the Toyota factory. However, the principles of eliminating waste and achieving interruption free flow may be found at an even more profound level in the design of Apple’s breakthrough products and the intuition of Steve Jobs. Reading Walter Isaacson’s recent and excellent biography of Jobs I am struck by the intuitive sense of lean, of flow, of simplicity, that he demanded from both the aesthetics and the technical workings of every product. You would be hard pressed to find an executive with a better sense of the interaction between the social and the technical.
