Let’s be honest, it can be difficult to get people excited about the subject of business process improvement. The phrase itself has no personality, no flair.

Of course, we know that continuous improvement and innovation are requirements for success in today’s hyper-competitive environment. One way to get teams excited about business process improvement is to bring meaning to it using an inspiring motto or catchphrase that gives life to the idea. You can choose one and use it as the theme for your business process improvement efforts, or offer a new bit of inspiration every week.

Of course, you can invent your own, but we’ve found some quotes from business leaders and others that might do quite nicely. Here are a few. 

It's hard to believe that the first half of 2020 is in the books. Just kidding. I don't blame you if you feel like there's been 10 years worth of news in the last six months. It's been intense. COVID-19 has impacted every American to varying degrees and much has changed about the way we live and work.

This year, more than ever, it makes sense to do a mid-year check-in with every employee. Despite the challenging situation, continuous improvement driven by every team member is still essential.

By asking the right questions, you might uncover ways that leaders can provide better support for staff members trying to make the best out of difficult circumstances. Here are a few we recommend.

Maybe Albert Einstein was talking about continuous improvement when he said, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Too often, we see organizations struggling to measure only those things that can be tied to a dollar amount and they, unfortunately, neglect the impact of ALL improvements. Let’s have a look at the top six ways to measure the impact of your organization’s improvement efforts.

The more conversations I have with people, the more it is apparent that everyone doesn’t yet understand that they need to wear a mask when they go into a public place (grocery, gas station, etc).

Here is a great short explanation and here is a great long explanation. 

In order for everyone to be on the same page about universal-public-mask wearing, we need to change the meaning, the intention, the belief, and ultimately the relationship we have with wearing masks. 

To do this let’s change the meaning of wearing a mask. Let's start making mask-wearing a...

• sign of respect for others as well as a sign of politeness

• signal to everyone that you are taking this seriously

• way to decrease the spread of Covid when you are asymptomatic

• reminder (and a barrier) to not touch your face when you are outside so you don't get infected

Many conversations about our fight against the Coronavirus imply that combating the virus is unnecessarily destroying the economy. Or, said another way, to preserve the economy, we need to relax our fight against the virus.

Sign up for today's webinar to find out how much you know about COVID-19 and learn the answers to what you don't!

How long are we going to be physically distant?

I don't know the future but since so many people ask me, I would like to give you my thoughts on how this is going to play out eventually. If you haven't had a chance to read about the Hammer and the Dance yet, I recommend you go read this first. I really like that terminology and visualization, and it is a model that we are hopefully starting to follow in this country.

We are not going to be physically distant forever. At one point the cost-benefit ratio of distancing will no longer be in balance. There are costs of remaining 100% distance forever (for instance, the economy will go from a recession into a depression, and there will eventually be wide scale social/mental collapse).

On the other hand, there is a cost to remaining 100% social (lots of people dying unnecessarily because our healthcare system will collapse). We are going to end up somewhere in the middle. I personally think the Hammer will be in terms of weeks, and The Dance will be in terms of months - if we can get our act together.

We’ve been writing a lot about physical distancing lately, as this has proven to be the most effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19. Without limiting social contact, we don’t have a chance at slowing the spread of the infection - which means an overloaded healthcare system and a lot of unnecessary deaths.

Last Updated On: April 16, 2020

With so much information available online, it's hard to know what's true and what isn't. We tried to find a list of good sources to share with you, and couldn't - so we put our heads together with the smartest people we know, and made our own. Share yours in the comments!

COUNTERS

Want an accurate count of the status of COVID-19 cases around the world? These trackers are easy to read and are updated frequently. There’s a slight variation in numbers between the sites, but this is likely due to small delays in reporting and updating the pages.

• Worldometer
• Bing
• nCoV2019
• New York Times
• Social Distancing Scoreboard

This one from Johns Hopkins University looks like it’s going to be awesome, though not all of the modules are built out yet as of this writing.

Today I wanted to share with you a message that I just got from my friend, a pediatrician.

"It’s time to ‘name and shame’ the people who are putting others at risk. Name and shame the businesses that are hosting public events. Name and shame those who attend them. Leaving the house right now is like driving drunk through a school zone of old people. You will kill someone, but in this case, you won’t even realize it.”

In this time of crisis, we have an ethical duty and responsibility to stay home and stay physically distant. Every day you choose to run an errand, go out to dinner, or meet up for a playdate with your stir-crazy kids, you are contributing to the exponential spread of this virus. Every day, every hour, every minute that it spreads, real people will die.

Check out this blog post about what exponential growth means and why you should care.

The thing about exponential growth is that it’s not exciting, until it is. 

The growth rate looks slow at first. 

It’s been 24 hours since my last post, and I’ve come to see that part of the problem is that people don’t understand what the word “exponential” means.

The word exponential has been floating around a lot lately as concern about COVID-19 grows and spreads around the world. It’s perhaps the most important word in understanding all of this, and since it’s been a while since most of us took a math class, I thought this would be a good time to review the concept and how it relates to the current pandemic.

So first. What does exponential growth mean? It means that the growth is increasing at a faster and faster rate. When it comes to the spread of a virus, an exponential growth rate means that as we go from one day to the next, the number of cases multiplies by some constant number that’s greater than one. I’ll also explain how physical distance plays into the equation and why that will save the life of your grandmother (and mine).