Bruce Hamilton
An old TV series I watched recently reminded me of an experience I’ve had many times in my work. In this I Love Lucy episode, Lucy is ordered by Ricky to create a schedule to make her “more...
Bruce Hamilton
As any conference-goer can attest, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line when that line is the lunch line. At lean conferences like the ones I’ve attended, it’s especially...
Bruce Hamilton
Across a large swath of the United States, the winter has been especially cold, snowy, and dreary this year. So here’s a post with a link to a cheery video at the end, just to pick my spirits up—...
Bruce Hamilton
An engineering manager who I worked with 25 years ago challenged me one day. “You know, Bruce, if all employees were engineers, you wouldn’t need mistake-proofing,” he said. At the time, I was too...
Bruce Hamilton
In 1966, a freshman at a college in Maine attended a speech given by Floyd McKissick, newly appointed head of the Congress of Racial Equality, better known as CORE. In the packed auditorium there...
Bruce Hamilton
Twenty years ago, I was introduced to a graphical method for, as it was put to me, “sharing what you see” with others. It was referred to as a material and information flow diagram, or M&I for...
Bruce Hamilton
When I was 50 years younger and 50 pounds lighter, I tried my hand at pole vaulting. It’s a peculiar track-and-field event that involves running at full speed with a heavy pole in hand toward a...
Bruce Hamilton
I’ve always felt the need to accentuate the positive, something I think I picked up from my mother. In tense situations she would always interject, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” This usually...
Bruce Hamilton
Last week marked the 100th anniversary of the introduction of a moving assembly line at Henry Ford’s Highland assembly plant, an innovation that inaugurated mass production.
Ford was not the first...
Bruce Hamilton
Many managers ask me, “How can I accelerate my company’s lean transformation?” My answer is twofold: First get the direction right, and then get everyone rowing in that direction.
One of my...
