Early Bird Registration Offer
Register by February 22, 2013, for your choice of one of the following items. Your selection will be delivered to you upon check-in at the conference.
Lean Acres: A Tale of Strategic Innovation and Improvement in a Farm-iliar Setting, Jim Bowie, Quality Press, 2011 (264 pgs.)
This book
uses a fable based on animated farm animals that makes reading it more fun that a typical business book. Before you write it off as too corny or simplistic, know this—the group dynamics are real, the problems are valid, the solutions legitimate, and the book reviews uniformly excellent. Missy Gieselmann of the Advisory Committee gives it two thumbs up. The book asks you to consider a complex environment with multiple classes interacting between functional units with requirements that are perceived as exclusive and unique, and personalities that reinforce presumed boundaries. You follow the animals as they work together using the basics of four quality methodologies (Lean, Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, and Business Process Reengineering) to address the problems they face, discover solutions together, and move forward in their continuous performance improvement journey.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath, Crown Business, 2010 (320 pgs.)
Why is it so har
d to make lasting changes in our companies and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say the authors. Our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort—but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers—can unite both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results, such as the manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service. The book brings together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change.
2013 CI Conference T-Shirt
Begin your collection of conference T-shirts and trumpet your passion for continuous improvement at the same time. Our debut shirt, in black, features the CI logo and conference name printed on beefy 6.1-oz tightly knitted fabric for long-lasting wear. The Hanes® 100% pre-shrunk cotton shirt is cut a little larger and will hold up well through numerous washings. It features shoulder-to-shoulder taping with coverstitched neck ribbing, a tagless label, and double-needle-stitched sleeves and bottom hem.
Want the shirt instead of one of the books? Click here and request it now.