SWOT that PEST

Many people are familiar with SWOT analyses, whether for a business or a person (the latter being a component of some professional CPD schemes), but fewer are familiar with PEST.

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Gods of Management

I’ve previously written about Charles Handy’s cultural models (see here) but omitted to reference the Greek gods that he attributed to them.

QFD

Returning to the quality tools theme, QFD (Quality Function Deployment) is a technique and tool developed in Japan that is, in my opinion, much under-utilised in the West. 

Teams

The word team appears a lot in my writing and, I believe, with good reason.  Most of us work in a team, whether or not that’s what it’s called – and that also applies in our non-work life, too.  Charles Handy likens teams to tribes in some of his books, bringing together theories of teams and theories of culture.

Motivation

There’s a whole discipline here – what follows is merely a starting point to follow up.  Actually, nothing here should be new to anyone who has studied management and, if it is new, and you do think of yourself as being in management, you probably need to start studying.

The Basic 7 Quality Tools

It’s generally agreed that there are seven basic tools needed to get started in SPC (Statistical Process Control).  Some are so basic many people use them without realising they’re getting into statistics (and their link to what we think of as statistics often seems quite tenuous)…

Data Types

Anyone familiar with computer spreadsheets (e.g. Excel) will be familiar with cell formatting and the different data types (numbers, text, currency, etc.) and a competent computer programmer will be all too aware of the need for consistent data types within variables.