Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: June 26, 2026

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News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better.

This edition examines how AI, leadership, employee engagement, and problem-solving are reshaping the future of work. Highlights include building human capability in the AI era, creating a culture of continuous improvement, avoiding false executive alignment, improving employee retention through clarity and communication, and setting challenging but well-defined goals.

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Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation

“Until organizational leadership can articulate a vision of AI that develops human capability rather than replacing it, expect to hear more boos.” Art Smalley, author of one of my favourite improvement books, Four Types of Problems, sifts through what industry leaders are predicting, and walking back in many cases, about what type of person will thrive in the AI world. Will it be the curious generalist? Will an elite few “control” bots and order direction or will entire workforces become liberated to solve problems? No one knows for sure, but Smalley implores organizations to look beyond a tool-based view and to develop a vision for how to enable its workforce and operating systems.

HR's dual mandate in the AI-era

AI is expected to change jobs and how organizations help develop people, but are the functions that design job architecture ready to support these shifts? HR needs to transform itself while supporting AI enablement. 

All business is problem solving

I've been helping organizations improve for 25 years. One seemingly universal truth is that delegating improvement to a small number of people in the middle of the organization will not transform your organization. But engaging everyone in solving real customer problems just might. DJ Kim shares how in the 1990's Nike turned to Toyota to learn how to drive a culture of improvement.

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Creating a Culture of Improvement

You haven't used a roadmap for years. You don't need one to start leading change.

One of my pet peeves is the continued reliance on archaic terms like “blueprint”, “playbook,” or “roadmap”, especially when describing progressing forward with uncertainty. Seriously, when was the last time you opened up a physical roadmap to plan your trip across the city to a place you hadn't been before? It's far more likely that you entered it into an app, started on the preferred route, and adjusted along the way. 

Pharma Global discovered that transformation is an adaptive journey, not one where a single pathway is prescribed. Set the destination for your teams and then trust them to progress and adapt their pathway to get there.

The false alignment trap

I've been involved in many transformation or reengineering efforts that didn't even come close to realizing the benefits expected, partly because the problems were overstated or the problem-solving was underestimated. But the biggest reason has always been a lack of total commitment and alignment from the top. It turns out research confirms my experience.

When executives pretend to be committed and fail to address interpersonal challenges, the rest of the organization spins its wheels or end up working on the wrong things. Executives: please get alignment on why you're changing, what you're changing (and not changing), and how changes will occur before unleashing chaos on your people. 

AI has a leadership problem, not a technology problem

Any seasoned improvement expert knows that simply handing new tools to the organizations and imploring them to improve is not going to generate the outcomes they hope for. Similarly with AI, organizations that are getting real traction are the ones focusing on the hard changes – trust, leadership, and respect for people. 

Engagement isn't a reliable predictor of retention anymore

The employee engagement surveys have been stale for a long time and are increasingly less relevant, with “say, stay, strive” as the basis of engagement survey analysis for decades. But what if engagement is not correlated to “staying” anymore? A survey by Firstup shows what many of us have known for quite some time: engagement is no longer a reliable predictor of retention. Clarity, consistency, and communication are increasingly important for getting employees to think less often about leaving. It's time to start measuring and paying attention to the things that actually drive employees away.

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Coaching – Developing Self & Others

People don't hate “hard goals”, they hate uncertainty

I've led many teams, and goal-setting is always one of the most important and trickiest exercises. I have often encountered resistance to “stretch goals” in favour of “realistic” goals, but what makes a goal “realistic”? Usually, it's when people can visualize and gain confidence in a pathway to get to a goal. 

Your problem isn't that your goals are hard, it's that they're ill-defined.

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