Continual Improvement Proficiency for Business Leaders
What you'll learn
- Understand the nature of organizational issues and how to lead organization-wide actions for continual improvement.
- Act as an effective participant and project team member on cross-functional improvement activities.
- Apply structured problem-solving concepts and principles in improvement projects within your own work area.
- Apply the principles of statistical thinking, process analysis, and systems engineering in pursuit of improvement actions.
- Learn how to read and interpret the basic graphical tools of lean and statistical process analysis for work improvement.
- Communicate the organization’s strategy to assure continual improvement of its work activities and results.
- Launch an improvement project that you will supervise.
Requirements
- There are no requirements for this course. Having the possibility to do the activities together with your management team gives the biggest benefits.
Description
Are you a business leader? Do you have responsibility for a broad part of your organization? Is quality important to you? Sure, delivering quality in the products or services that are delivered to customers is important, but that can be delegated! Are you sure that the total responsibility for quality should be in fact borne by the operational part of your organization? What about responsibility for the quality of the current business, its financial performance, its contribution to society, or its ability to sustain its future performance? Can these responsibilities for quality be delegated to the operational component in your organization?
Have you ever sat in a quality training program (whether it be Total Quality Management, Lean training, or Lean Six Sigma training) and wondered how learning about Fishbone diagrams, Pareto charts, control statistics, etc. can make you a better leader? Are these the tools of leadership or is there something that is missing?
If you are frustrated by what you have been through it is most likely because you have not found a guide who can take you on this journey. That is the purpose of this training. To enable management teams to become the quality leaders that they need to be to manage a successful business.
The first step in this process is to become proficient in the basic aspects of quality as it applies to the job of the executive function. That is the purpose of this first program. It was designed by Dr. Gregory H. Watson, one of today’s thought leaders in quality who has focused on developing programs that enable executives to create quality as a competitive difference in their organizations. His 1994 book, Strategic Benchmarking, opened management’s vision to a different way of learning about how to manage their organizations. After then, Dr. Watson has been engaged in a private consulting practice dedicated to helping executives and their companies learn how to manage quality in a more comprehensive way.
His retirement from this active consultancy has led to a unique opportunity to package his experiences and lessons learned into a series of executive-directed quality engagements. Each module in this basic proficiency training consist of lectures that are punctuated with workshop activities for the leaders of an organization to perform. Step-by-step, a logical progression expands business leader thinking from a myopic understanding of quality as applying merely to products or service activity of operations, but also to come to understand and exercise their own responsibility for developing the system that will establish quality as a discipline that leads to cultural differentiation, which is a sustainable competitive advantage.
Who this course is for:
- People serving in any executive or leadership function
- Small business owners
- Functional managers in cross-functional organization
- Business leaders of administration and operations
- Chief quality officers and directors of the quality function
- Quality professionals who coach business leaders
- Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belts
- Business and operations excellence leaders
- Professionals interested in improving organizations
Instructors
Dr. Watson is an industrial engineer with executive experience in three Fortune 500 firms and long-term consulting experience with another five Fortune 500 companies. Additionally, he has consulted to over two dozen smaller companies and divisions of larger organizations. Dr. Watson is a global specialist in quality management at the executive level and author of seven books and over 600 other publications.
Dr. Watson was the course designer for the original Lean Six Sigma training by the American Society for Quality in 1999 and he was the first Master Black Belt designated in Europe by Dr. Mikel Harry. He has been awarded the highest honors from the American Society for Quality, the European Organization for Quality, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers, and the International Academy for Quality. Dr. Watson has been elected an Honorary Member of 20 national quality organizations
Responsible for production of courses by Dr. Gregory H. Watson.
Mr. Turtiainen is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, who has been in the team developing a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Course for European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management. Currently the course, which has a blended learning model, is taught all around Europe on a voluntary basis.