Beyond Six Sigma and Lean! Design your processes to facilitate real business growth, in both healthy and unhealthy economies Design for Operational Excellence defines why companies embark upon continuous improvement—and the true answer is not to improve efficiency, quality, or eliminate waste! The reason is to achieve Operational Excellence. Duggan, an established authority on OpEx, provides the design criteria and guidelines that enable you to grow your business organically by refocusing management’s attention from running the business to growing the business. Founded on eight key principles, this groundbreaking system facilitates the continuous flow of value into any operation—from customer service to sales to manufacturing. Kevin J. Duggan is a renowned speaker, executive mentor, and educator in applying advanced lean techniques to achieve Operational Excellence and the author of two books on the subject: Creating Mixed Model Value Streams and The Office That Grows Your Business—Achieving Operational Excellence in Your Business Processes. As the Founder of the Institute for Operational Excellence, the leading educational center on Operational Excellence, and Duggan Associates, an international training and advisory firm, Kevin has assisted many major corporations worldwide, including United Technologies Corporation, Caterpillar, Pratt & Whitney, Singapore Airlines, IDEX Corporation, GKN and Parker Hannifin. A recognized expert on Operational Excellence, Kevin is a frequent keynote speaker, master of ceremonies, and panelist at international conferences, and has appeared on CNN and the Fox Business Network.

The purpose of this manual is to provide clear and helpful information for maintaining gravel roads. Very little technical help is available to small agencies that are responsible for managing these roads. Gravel road maintenance has traditionally been "more of an art than a science" and very few formal standards exist. This manual contains guidelines to help answer the questions that arise concerning gravel road maintenance such as: What is enough surface crown? What is too much? What causes corrugation? The information is as nontechnical as possible without sacrificing clear guidelines and instructions on how to do the job right.

This document presents a synthesis of current information and operating practices related to roadside safety and is developed in metric units. The roadside is defined as that area beyond the traveled way (driving lanes) and the shoulder (if any) of the roadway itself. The focus of this guide is on safety treatments that minimize the likelihood of serious injuries when a driver runs off the road. This guide replaces the 1989 AASHTO "Roadside Design Guide."

Excellence and the highest levels of performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games have always been an object of fascination to both scientists and lay people. Only during the last 20 years have scientists studied these levels of performance in the laboratory in order to identify their mediating mechanisms. Contrary to the common belief that innate talents are the critical factors for exceptional performance, investigators have found that acquired skills, knowledge, and physiological adaptations in response to intense practice are the primary mechanisms, mediating the highest levels of performance. This is the first and only book to examine how elite performers effect their exceptional accomplishments. The world's leading researchers on expert performance and creative achievement review theories and recent findings from many different domains of expertise on how experts optimize improvement in their performance and eventually attain excellence. Elite performers are shown to have engaged in deliberate-practice activities specifically designed to improve their performance from an early age. By age 20 they have often accumulated over 10,000 hours of practice! The essential elements of deliberate practice, such as specific goals to improve performance, successive refinement through repetition, feedback and instruction, are explicated for different domains. Although the content of practice tasks will necessarily differ from domain to domain, investigators have found invariant characteristics for the optimal duration of practice sessions, maximal amounts of daily practice, the length of intense preparation (around 10 years), and ages of peak performance. Some of the book's chapters extend the review to the acquisition of everyday-life skills such as reading, to the performance of teams of experts, and to the development of creative achievement, geniuses, and artistic child prodigies. The book concludes with commentaries by several outstanding scientists in psychology, education, and history of science who discuss the generalizability of presented ideas and raise issues for future issues. EXTRA COPY...It could be said that striving for excellence is what characterizes humanity, or perhaps what characterizes humanity at its best. Why do so few individuals ever reach the highest levels when so many start out on the Road to Excellence? In this book, the world's foremost researchers of expert performance in domains as diverse as sports, medicine, chess, and the arts explore the similarities and differences in the extended and strenuous Road to Excellence taken by the successful individuals in each domain. Their findings will intrigue and inspire readers who are themselves driven to achieve or who simply want to better understand the processes involved.

Context-sensitive solutions (CSS) reflect the need to consider highway projects as more than just transportation facilities. Depending on how highway projects are integrated into the community, they can have far-reaching impacts beyond their traffic or transportation function. CSS is a comprehensive process that brings stakeholders together in a positive, proactive environment to develop projects that not only meet transportation needs, but also improve or enhance the community. Achieving a flexible, context-sensitive design solution requires designers to fully understand the reasons behind the processes, design values, and design procedures that are used. This AASHTO Guide shows highway designers how to think flexibly, how to recognize the many choices and options they have, and how to arrive at the best solution for the particular situation or context. It also strives to emphasize that flexible design does not necessarily entail a fundamentally new design process, but that it can be integrated into the existing transportation culture. This publication represents a major step toward institutionalizing CSS into state transportation departments and other agencies charged with transportation project development.

This book examines the experience of 11 universities in nine countries around the world that have grappled with the challenge of building successful research institutions in difficult circumstances and outlines key lessons of from this experience.

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 672: Roundabouts: An Informational Guide - Second Edition explores the planning, design, construction, maintenance, and operation of roundabouts. The report also addresses issues that may be useful in helping to explain the trade-offs associated with roundabouts. This report updates the U.S. Federal Highway Administration's Roundabouts: An Informational Guide, based on experience gained in the United States since that guide was published in 2000.