Jeff Irby
Jeff Irby is the Principal at Speed with Purpose, a training company with a mission to change the way America works so that businesses thrive, employees perform at their very best, professional and personal relationships are rewarding, and families prosper. Based on thirty years of industry experience, Irby has taught thousands of individuals a unique method that combines work-life balance principles with a corresponding, tangible workflow. Most recently, his titles have included VP of Middle Markets for BearingPoint Consulting and Faculty member for BearingPoint's Yale School of Management Executive Development Program. Irby received his Juris Doctor from Thomas M. Cooley Law School and his Bachelor of Science from Indiana University. More information about Speed with Purpose can be found at www.speedwithpurpose.com.
Articles by this Author
Are Your Processes Lean?
- By Jeff Irby
- Published 03/18/2008
- Personal Development
You may have heard the terms "Lean Manufacturing" or "Six Sigma", and most likely they were used in the context of improving quality or reducing the cost of operations. While in fact these terms do have their roots in the manufacturing industry, the truth is that both can also be effectively applied to information age companies. Lean's major objective is to speed up processes, while Six Sigma's is to improve quality as defined by the customer. Applied together, you can achieve faster processes with a higher level of quality. The average information age worker spends 40% of the day processing information, not actually working on the underlying content. Applying Lean principles to your processes can reduce processing time, thereby improving your performance.
Prioritizing Your Time
- By Jeff Irby
- Published 02/27/2008
- Personal Development
A friend of mine shared with me that a coworker of his arrives at work by 8:00 a.m. each morning and never leaves before 8:00 p.m. each night; additionally, he has a one hour commute each way. Does this person have the proper work/life balance?
Boosting Your Productivity
- By Jeff Irby
- Published 02/14/2008
- Personal Development
To be effective in today's work world, you must have high performing systems that serve your needs and aid in helping you live an integrated life. Like any well run business, the systems should be built deliberately with a close connection to your overall mission and tightly integrated to help you achieve optimum performance. Do your systems do that for you?
Email Triage
- By Jeff Irby
- Published 02/9/2008
- Personal Development
This is the time of year that many of us will take vacation, and one of the dreaded aspects of vacation is the return to an overflowing email box. This phenomenon can also happen when we are in day-long meetings or traveling for business. Here is my recommended approach to manage the volume and get focused on what is truly most important to you.
Extreme Workers
- By Jeff Irby
- Published 01/29/2008
- Work and Life
An examination of current workforce trends reveals an escalating number of extreme workers. A non-stop work-style once exclusive to the executive suite is now finding its ways to all levels of knowledge worker positions. The more people work like this, the more time they pour into their jobs. Unfortunately, the extra time is actually giving them less return for their efforts. Many are operating like an old cell phone battery that has been drained and re-charged one too many times-it takes longer to refresh and the power runs out quickly.
Organizing for Efficiency
- By Jeff Irby
- Published 01/25/2008
- Personal Development
Is your in-box overflowing? Is paper crowding your space? In today's society of abundance, one thing is certain: we do not lack stuff. Economists have concluded that we have used our soaring productivity over the last 50 years to purchase more items, rather than to gain more free time. Here is the challenge: If all of that stuff gets in the way of productivity, what do we do with it?
Information Overload
- By Jeff Irby
- Published 01/20/2008
- Work and Life
The increased pressure on the knowledge worker, caught between an age of manual labor and one of thought production, can be seen in the form of stress related diseases. Additionally, from a corporate perspective, high employee turnover and low employee productivity is a serious threat to earnings. Indeed, accounting for already achieved and potential damages of this new era, perhaps it is more appropriately titled “the Information Overload Age’. It is time for the knowledge worker to step out of the chaos and assess the situation. Diagnosing one’s company as suffering from information overload is not a complicated task, the symptoms being clear and detrimental.
Revisiting Your Goals
- By Jeff Irby
- Published 01/14/2008
- Personal Development
The year is just beginning... This is a perfect time to stop, take assessment of last year's accomplishments, and revisit your goals. There is still time to make a material impact toward your goals. In this article, I will show you how to make your abstract goals more tangible, how to avoid goal stoppers, and how to encourage goal enablers, in your life.