Six Sigma changed the face of manufacturing quality. Now, HumanSigma is poised to do the same for sales and service organizations. Human Sigma offers an innovative, research-based approach to one of the toughest challenges businesses face today: how to effectively manage the employee-customer encounter to drive business success. Based on research spanning 10 million employees and 10 million customers around the world, the Human Sigma approach combines a proven method for assessing the health of the employee-customer encounter with a disciplined process for improving it. Human Sigma is based on five rules to bring excellence to how employees engage and interact with customers: RULE #1: E Pluribus Unum. Employee and customer experiences must be managed together — not as separate entities. RULE #2: Feelings Are Facts. Emotions drive and shape the employee-customer encounter. RULE #3: Think Globally, Measure and Act Locally. The employee-customer encounter must be measured and managed at the local level. RULE #4: There Is One Number You Need to Know. Employee and customer engagement interact to drive enhanced financial performance. And this interaction can be quantified and summarized with a single performance metric. RULE #5: If You Pray for Potatoes, You Better Grab a Hoe. Good intentions alone do not constitute a plan of action. Sustainable improvement in the employee-customer encounter requires disciplined local action coupled with a companywide commitment to changing how employees are recruited, positioned in roles, rewarded and recognized, and importantly, how they are managed. Essential reading for global business leaders, Human Sigma shows how sales and service companies can flourish in the new global economy. It reveals a profoundly different method for managing human systems for growth. Blending strategic analysis with hands-on, practical steps and advice, Human Sigma will change how you view your work, your employees and your customers forever.

Six Sigma changed the face of manufacturing quality. Now, HumanSigma is poised to do the same for sales and services. Human Sigma offers an innovative research-based approach to one of the toughest challenges facing sales and services companies today: how to effectively manage the employee-customer encounter to drive business success. What would your company look like if you could increase the revenue and profitability potential of every customer by more than 20 percent? What if you could double the productivity of every employee? And what if these two phenomena together could drive overall organizational performance exponentially? What would your company look like? And how would you go about creating this kind of change? One thing is certain: Business leaders are never going to inspire higher levels of employee productivity and build more passionate customer relationships by doing the same things they have tried for the past 25 years. Business leaders need something fresh. Something new. The last thing they need is more of the same old conventional wisdom about "satisfying" their employees and their customers. Based on solid research by The Gallup Organization, Human Sigma will appeal to senior leaders and line managers alike who are looking for a way to dramatically increase productivity, retain a base of high value customers, and improve overall business performance. Human Sigma is: - Rigorous: Based on research involving hundreds of companies, and over 10 million employees and 10 million customers around the world. - Innovative: Cutting-edge management science supported by data, including brain imaging research into customer's emotional connections to the companies they love. - Practical: The principles in the book were developed from observations of real-life successes, not some fictional freaks-of-nature that exist only in a laboratory. As such, the lessons contained in the book have been tested in the real world, and can be applied in many situations. - Interactive: The book contains a code that can be used to estimate the potential value of HumanSigma to readers' organizations.

As a technical organization, charged with performing groundbreaking and pathfinding challenges on a daily basis, NASA has long valued the role of its Chief Engineers and Lead Systems Engineers. Although it takes a team to accomplish our missions and no members are unimportant, the Chief Engineers and Lead Systems Engineers who we look to lead our technical teams are critical to the success of our endeavors. It is this corps of dedicated, experienced, and passionate problem solvers and leaders who battle the technical headwinds that face every project, finding often hidden solutions and overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to create paths to success. Furthermore, it is that indomitable spirit of ingenuity and perseverance that defines the Agency. Developing our Chief Engineers and Lead Systems Engineers is a commitment of the NASA engineering community, and one of our tenets for excellence. This development ensures our corps of engineers obtain the depth of technical acumen that they require, first as discipline engineers and then as Chief Engineers and Lead Systems Engineers, but also the associated management skills and experience to ensure they can interact with the rest of the project team and with program, Center, and Agency leadership. What's more, this development also ensures that NASA Chief Engineers and Lead Systems Engineers proficiently serve as leaders of their own technical teams, and that's what this book is all about. These technical leaders are critical to successfully implementing the three safety tenets we inherited from the Apollo program. These include the following: Strong in-line checks and balances. This means that engineers check their fellow engineers, and that no one checks their own homework. 1. Healthy tension between responsible organizations. In NASA today that is the programs and the three Technical Authorities (Engineering, Safety, and Health and Medical). Each organization has to be on equal footing with separate but equal chains of command to allow issues to be raised independently and provide the healthy tension to create organizational checks and balances. 2. "Value-added" independent assessment. "Value-added" means you bring in outside technical experts to peer review critical issues. Having a fresh set of eyes on a problem can provide a different perspective, leverage different experiences and result in more robust solutions. 3. NASA arrived at these three tenets through considerable blood, sweat, and loss, and our commitment to them is now inscribed in our Agency governance. As Chief Engineers and Lead Systems Engineers, your role in this is paramount, and achieving excellence in this is an expectation of your job. Serving in this role is not an easy task, but it is a tremendously reward¬ing one. You are the leaders of your technical teams, owners of the technical baseline, standard bearers of engineering best practices, decision makers, risk mitigators and problem solvers. You are Chief Engineers and Lead Systems Engineers, the title of which should say it all.

Strength-based Lean Six Sigma is a new way of approaching process improvement that combines the best practices of two established methodologies to generate a new approach in order to help you develop and deliver increased high performance in any organization. It is the first book to use approaches in business improvement as well as organizational change for optimum organizational performance and improved agility. Combining the energy and motivation released through a strengths-based approach with the focus on quality and efficiency generated by lean six sigma, it offers practitioners from all disciplines the opportunity to understand each other and work successfully together to drive effective and powerful change programmes.

Growing Up Human reveals how our evolutionary history has shaped a phenomenon experienced by all readers – childhood. Tracking our evolutionary history, anthropological science has begun to unravel one feature that sets us apart from the many animals that came before us – our uniquely long childhoods. Growing Up Human looks at how we have diverged from our roots to stay 'forever young' and how the evolution of childhood is a critical part of the human story. Beginning with the ways animals invest in their offspring, anthropologist Brenna Hassett moves through the steps of making a baby, from pair-bonding to hidden ovulation, points where our species has repeatedly stepped off the standard primate path. From the mystery of monogamy to the minefield of modern parenting advice, Hassett explains how differences between humans and our closest cousins have led to our messy mating systems, dangerous pregnancies, and difficult births, and what these tell us about our babies we are trying to build. Using observations of our closest primate relatives, archaeological relics, and the bones and teeth of our ancestors, Growing Up Human explores the evolution of our childhood right down the fossil record. In our species, investment doesn't stop at birth, and examining every aspect of our care and feeding, from the chemical composition of our milk to formal education, reveals what we have evolved our weird and wonderful childhoods for.

PROVEN STRATEGIES FOR REVOLUTIONIZING HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS "If I had to sum up this book in one word, the word would be 'brilliant'! This is one of the most insightful books on TOC, not just for healthcare, that I have ever read." --BOB SPROULL, author of The Ultimate Improvement Cycle: Maximizing Profits through the Integration of Lean, Six Sigma, and the Theory of Constraints Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management lays out an integrated approach for using three industrially based methods to transform hospital operations in terms of patient outcomes and experience, financial viability, and employee satisfaction. This pioneering guide presents a scalable strategy for managing bottlenecks, eliminating waste, reducing errors, and containing costs in healthcare organizations, as well as sustaining the gains achieved. Real-world case studies illustrate successful performance improvement implementations that have realized breakthrough operational and financial results. COVERAGE INCLUDES: Constraints Management applications in healthcare The NOVACES SystemCPI--an integrated performance improvement deployment approach Three-part assessment--strategic gap analysis, system-level value stream analysis, and system constraint analysis Planning a performance improvement program deployment to ensure timely and consistent execution Applying the right tool to the right problem from a system perspective Sustaining gains achieved by the performance improvement team Defining a path to self-sufficiency

A war is coming, a battle that will stretch from the prehistoric forests of the ancient past to the cutting-edge research labs of today, all to reveal a true mystery buried deep within our DNA, a mystery that will leave readers changed forever . . . In this groundbreaking masterpiece of ingenuity and intrigue that spans 50,000 years in human history, New York Times bestselling author James Rollins takes us to mankind’s next great leap. But will it mark a new chapter in our development . . . or our extinction? In the remote mountains of Croatia, an archaeologist makes a strange discovery: a subterranean Catholic chapel, hidden for centuries, holds the bones of a Neanderthal woman. In the same cavern system, elaborate primitive paintings tell the story of an immense battle between tribes of Neanderthals and monstrous shadowy figures. Who is this mysterious enemy depicted in these ancient drawings and what do the paintings mean? Before any answers could be made, the investigative team is attacked, while at the same time, a bloody assault is made upon a primate research center outside of Atlanta. How are these events connected? Who is behind these attacks? The search for the truth will take Commander Gray Pierce of Sigma Force 50,000 years into the past. As he and Sigma trace the evolution of human intelligence to its true source, they will be plunged into a cataclysmic battle for the future of humanity that stretches across the globe . . . and beyond. With the fate of our future at stake, Sigma embarks on its most harrowing odyssey ever—a breathtaking quest that will take them from ancient tunnels in Ecuador that span the breadth of South America to a millennia-old necropolis holding the bones of our ancestors. Along the way, revelations involving the lost continent of Atlantis will reveal true mysteries tied to mankind’s first steps on the moon. In the end, Gray Pierce and his team will face to their greatest threat: an ancient evil, resurrected by modern genetic science, strong enough to bring about the end of man’s dominance on this planet. Only this time, Sigma will falter—and the world we know will change forever.