Harish Jose
Kaizen is often translated as “continuous improvement” and identified as one of the core themes in lean. Today I’m pondering the question: Can kaizen ever be bad for an organization?
In order to...
Ryan E. Day
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You might say what Henry Ford did for the automobile, GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi have done for the gas and steam turbine industry. Naturally, the tools and technicians of both...
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
We recently had dinner with a wonderful friend and colleague, Michelle Guenther. During our meal, Michelle mentioned a conversation at work when she responded to a question with, “What I believe to...
Bruce Hamilton
The following is inspired by The Teachings of Don Juan (Washington Square Press, reprint 1985), an anthropological novel from the 1960s written by Carlos Castaneda, chronicling his travels with Don...
Bob Emiliani
To this day, lean management has yet to enter the mainstream in business. It remains solidly on the fringe, despite great efforts by many people over many decades.
You almost never hear of lean...
Kevin Meyer
Nearly three decades ago, one of my first bosses pulled me aside. I forget the underlying incident except that I had somehow screwed up, and he bluntly told me to “sweat the details.” I clearly...
Bruce Hamilton
Last weekend in the Nantucket Ferry terminal, I passed a defunct phone booth: an ornate wooden kiosk used 20 years ago to frame a pay phone, provide a modicum of privacy, and hold a phone book. It...
Jim Benson
Prioritization is stressful. We find ourselves prematurely making value decisions about what to pull and when (right now!).
Recently a client asked, “How can I prioritize my work when there is no...
Annette Franz
Last month, I wrote about the concept of lean management and what that means not only for your company but also for your customers.
If company leadership wants to transform the culture of the...
Harish Jose
Uncertainty is all around us. A lean leader’s main purpose is to develop people so they can tackle uncertainty. There are two ways to tackle uncertainty: One is genchi genbutsu (go and see, or...
Barbara A. Cleary
In a rapidly changing business environment, it’s sometimes hard just to keep up with everyday demands—never mind having time to develop new and better approaches to changing requirements, needs, or...
William A. Levinson
ISO 9001:2015 clause 4.2—“Understanding the needs and expectations of interested parties” requires the organization to determine the “requirements of these interested parties that are relevant to...
Bruce Hamilton
A friend and colleague remarked to me that “the lean market has become mature,” implying a depth and breadth of lean understanding in industry that I have rarely seen myself.
Standardized work,...
Peter J. Sherman
As organizations become successful and grow, uncertainty is generally the enemy. Thriving organizations seek to eliminate variation and increase efficiency. They identify best practices and...
Kevin Meyer
As I was researching the remarkable similarities between lean and Zen for my book, The Simple Leader (Gemba Academy, 2016) one of the most interesting—and meaningful—was the concept of...
Afaq Ahmed
New technologies have empowered customers to seek out the best products and services at the lowest cost and shortest delivery times. Customers can compare price and delivery information as well as...
Steve Garbrecht
Here’s a stat that might surprise you—according to LNS Research, 50 percent of manufacturers have implemented or will be implementing cross-functional groups to support their operational excellence...
Harish Jose
Today I’d like to take a look at a lesson from Taiichi Ohno regarding the pursuit of quality. His comment, “The pursuit of quantity cultivates waste, while the pursuit of quality yields value,”...
Eugene Daniell
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For more than 30 years, Hendrick Motorsports has consistently been one of NASCAR’s most successful teams. In the course of winning a record 11 Sprint Cup Series championships,...
Heinz Schandl
The world is using its natural resources at an ever-increasing rate. Worldwide, annual extraction of primary materials—biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores, and minerals—tripled between 1970 and 2010...
