After you get home from working your 40-hours what do you do? The average American flips the TV on and zones out for five hours. They then spend another three hours on a computer or on a smartphone. Something that my years refereeing hockey taught me is your job doesn’t end when the buzzer sounds. You can never stop learning and working to improve yourself. You must act like your competition is training 24x7x365 and…
Do you find yourself regularly searching through your emails trying to find information from your project foreman that you know you read, but just can’t remember what exactly it said? Think about how much waste this activity contains. Can you imagine if you were organized in a way where you could dramatically reduce the number of times you have to rummage through your email folders? Or even better, can you imagine if all of your…
Do you remember when you were in school and your teacher would assign a team project? You either loved or hated team projects because you knew that every group ended the same; there were always a few that led the group and did a majority of the work, the few that contributed, the one that argued every point, and the slacker who did absolutely nothing but still got the same grade. It was bullshit, and…
Last year we finalized Jenco’s principles. The very first principle is: Do all you have agreed to do. This is so incredibly powerful. It seems so simple, but in my experience I’ve found that sometimes people just get busy and don’t end up holding up their end of the bargain. We’ve all been there before – we told Mike, who called earlier in the day, we’d get back to him with an answer by the…
Do you count your steps each day? Not as a way to stay healthy, but as a way to track time? Imagine if it took you 45 seconds to walk through a maze of pallets and machines to reach material, only to reverse your steps to get to your work area. Now imagine if you could reduce the time by half just simply by placing the material closer to you. Sure those 45 seconds don’t…
For the last several months I noticed that Kelly has been leaving his door open all throughout the day – even when he is in meetings or at lunch. In my last two years of working at Jenco I’ve never known him to have his door open all day – he’d shut it during meetings or when he was super busy, but now it’s open 90% of the time. So I asked him, what gives?…
Can you say that you eliminate some form of waste every single day? As many of you already know, the Jenco team is on a LEAN journey and we recently took things one step further. Everyone in the office, our prefabrication team and a few of our Foremen read the book 2 Second Lean by Paul Akers. For five weeks we worked together to learn more about the different forms of waste, how to improve…
When I hear the claim “perception is reality” I shudder. In one sense it’s, true but it can mislead us as well. When we begin our awareness of “reality” we begin with our senses like sight, touch etc. The problem is our senses are not how we know the difference between what is real and what is not real. Our recurring experiences and our recurring intentions teach us what we “know” about reality. What this…
Last Friday Adam Botel, Rafi Abdullah and Richard Webster were three of thirty electricians who graduated from the Arizona Builders Alliance Apprenticeship Program. If you see them around the jobsites be sure to congratulate them! From all of us at the office we’d like to say, “Congrats guys!” Currently, we have 20% of our field staff enrolled in various stages of the ABA Apprenticeship Program, and another 3 guys are expected to graduate next year.…
One of the most powerful lessons I’ve ever received was given to me by one of my mentors. He told me to commit to ALWAYS saying “I don’t know” when I do not know what to do immediately when dealing with something that needs immediate action. This is because a situation that requires immediate action does not allow for re-work if you “try” something that doesn’t end up working. Here at Jenco, I am out…
We live in THE most economically challenging time in history. With the advent of the computer over the last 30 years, traditional thinking, jobs, careers, ways of learning, have all changed forever. We now compete with over 7 BILLION humans across the globe who are also trying to feed their families like you and me. In this ever-changing and advancing world, the competition will ensure that if we don’t first keep up and then outperform…
Are your skills helping your business organization gain momentum? The right hand man of Warren Buffet and a fellow Billionaire, Charlie Munger once said “I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart…” What I hear with that quote is rigorous learning, surrounding yourself with networks of strong thinking and…