PlantSuccess Newsletter
Volume III, Issue 21
24 September 2003
Dear Subscriber:
Were approaching week 4 of the NFLs 2003 season, launched
Sep 4th with a Thursday night game won by the Redskins, 16 13, over
the Jets. This event was planned for our nations capital and followed several
days of celebrations that will grow and become an appropriate bookend to the
Super Bowl.
In less than 40 years with a product that has been around
forever -- the NFL has done a remarkable job with the league, the teams, even
the individual games over 17 weeks, and the playoffs, all culminating with
extravaganza week and the Super Bowl, next in Houston, February 1st.
The NFL is a great example of managing politics, huge revenue opportunities,
and big egos to the benefit of relatively few people. The NFL has been much
more successful than the NBA or Major League Baseball who also share its
monopoly status.
I was amazed by a recent interview with a Redskin lineman as
he explained that the NFL was not about the score of the game or even who won
or loss it was about capturing eyes. This sounds like the objective of the
dot.coms, many of which contributed significantly to the Super Bowl with
classic advertisements and huge fees.
By definition, professional sports are monopolies and very
focused with some more successful than others the NFL is the envy of all,
particularly its Super Bowl Game. Twenty-five percent of the AFC and NFC teams
have not been to a Super Bowl, half of each divisions teams have one at least
one Super Bowl. With four victories and one loss, the Steelers have been the
best representative from the AFC. The Buffalo Bills are the most notable with a
string of consecutive losses from 1991 through 1994. The best performance from
the NFC comes from the 49ers with five Super Bowl victories and from the
Cowboys with five Super Bowl wins and three losses.
Perhaps the NFL has the fan-base that it does because it is
so successful and different from what most of us do every day. The process
industry is not a monopoly and works to a 52-week season that is often 24/7.
Offense and defense is often confused and there is always more than 11 on a
side. There are similarities, the required effective utilization of scarce
resources, a focus on best practices and, what DuPont calls Powerhouse
Performance.
Join our keynote, Jim Porter, DuPonts Chief Engineer and
VP of Engineering and Operations, as he addresses our 5th
anniversary conference in the Philadelphia area PlantSuccess Northeast 2003,
15 16 October at the PHL Airport Marriott. Porter will set the stage for
another roster of outstanding speakers from DuPont, Air Products, BPSolvay, Dow
Chemical, Merck, Rohm and Haas, the US Postal Service and others.
Visit www.PlantSuccess.com
to learn more about this unique conference, to review the current agenda, to
download presentations from previous conferences and to Register Online.
Best regards,
Carl. Howk, Chairman
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Current Links
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Peak Performance: A
well-orchestrated strategy of cost management
Authors
Amir Hartman and Craig LeGrande, in the current issue of Optimize magazine,
present their ideas for achieving Peak Performance.
In part,
Business-process optimization, or what we call vigilant productivity
management, is a set of critical capabilities that can revitalize companies and
produce bottom-line results. Our research earlier this year backs up the
premise that fine-tuning processes and eliminating those that don't work yields
ROI improvements. The business-process optimization solutions we studied
created financial returns through a combination of cost savings, revenue
enhancement, productivity improvement, and working-capital reductions. A common
result was a substantial ROI, defined as a shareholder return greater than 30%
over the cost of capital. We found average ROI to be 156% and average payback
periods of 1.74 years. READ
MORE.
Read this
sidebar to Peak Performance
A
study of instant-messaging abuse at work
From an InformationWeek
article, "There are currently 40 million business users of IM, and
there are genuine business benefits to the immediacy of IM. The technology is
not going to go away. But left unchecked, instant messaging could ultimately
cause more business problems than it solves." READ
MORE.
The
PlantSuccess Newsletter generates a substantial number of visits to our
website, we welcome the interest and the access to previous issues of the
Newsletter which are available there. If you'd like to share this newsletter
with a colleague, just forward a copy. Subscribe or cancel by sending a request
to Carl.Howk@PlantSuccess.com
Full links
to Volume III, Issue 21 Newsletter articles: