Thought for the Day
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit”
Aristotle
Aggregation of Marginal Gains
The topic for my October Growth & Profits Group was the Aggregation of Marginal Gains. Sir David Brailsford is credited with inventing this approach when he was Performance Director for British Cycling.
He explains it as “the one percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just one percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.
They started by optimising the things you might expect: the nutrition of riders, their weekly training program, the ergonomics of the bike seat, and the weight of the tires.
But Brailsford and his team didn’t stop there. They searched for one percent improvements in tiny areas that were overlooked by almost everyone else: discovering the pillow that offered the best sleep and taking it with them to hotels, testing for the most effective type of massage gel, and teaching riders the best way to wash their hands to avoid infection. They searched for one percent improvements everywhere.
Brailsford believed that if they could successfully execute this strategy, then Team Sky would be in a position to win the Tour de France in five years time. He was wrong. They won it in three years.
As a Group we looked at what Continuous Improvement looked like for us and came up with the following:
1 Project teams to look at our 1% gains
2 Learning the lessons from our Quality Assurance process
3 Planning our approach to an assignment to do the right amount of work at the right time with the right level of service for the quoted fee
4 Solve the root cause of problems
5 Management by walking about
How can you use the laws of Aggregated Marginal Gains to boost your Productivity?
Featured Video
Here is short introduction to the Aggregation of Marginal Gains in Sir David Brailsfords own words:
Just follow this link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBY3q8TqoXY
Business Support
I am pleased to report that MRW Corporate Solutions have won a contract from Greater Manchester Growth Hub, as part of the Portfolio Executive Consortium, to deliver their Executive Development Programme in 2016 and 2017.
The programme is supported through the European Regional Development Fund and allows for business leaders (owners, MDs, senior managers) to take a ‘fully-funded’ 18 hours of Executive Development, worth £1,500 over a 3 month period in a mix of one to one and group sessions.
To Pre-qualify, your businesses must be located or trading in one of the ten Greater Manchester Boroughs, you must be an SME with turnover less than €50m, have a minimum of 5 staff and must be Business to Business suppliers of product or services.
I can offer tailored sessions covering the following subjects but there is scope for a wider brief if you feel you need something different: –
- Team Profiling and Team Building
- Leadership Development
- Financial Consequence of Management Decisions
- Strategic Planning
- Managing Change
- Personal Productivity, Operational Efficiencies and adopting Continuous Improvement
- Executive Coaching and Executive Development
- We can also support you throughout the application process
Please note that the money is being spent more quickly than envisaged and is currently forecast to run out by May of 2017. So if you want to get the benefits from this programme let us know asap.
If you would like to take advantage of this free programme, contact me alan@mrwcs.com or phone 07860 813444