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Jim Benson
When you are a consultant, or worse yet, seen as a thought leader, people hire you expecting that you’ll know “the answers.” At best, what you actually know are paths to make sense of problems, communicate them, and then solve them. No consultant should ever arrive knowing the answers. If they do…
Bruce Hamilton
Here’s a personal reflection from my distant past that might describe a current state for some of you.
When I began working in manufacturing during the pre-lean era, the quoted lead time for my company’s products averaged 12 to 16 weeks. By the 1980s, however, many customers began to routinely…
Scott Berkun
Many of our most popular stories of discovery are portrayed as accidents or matters of luck. We love these stories because they make creativity seem easy and fun. Nevertheless, they are misleading.
In a recent New York Times opinion piece titled “How to Cultivate The Art of Serendipity,” author…
Bob Emiliani
Nearly 30 years after the start of the lean movement, there is widespread agreement that things have not gone according to plan. Of course, there have been some notable successes (particularly from those who worked with Shingijutsu), yet they are far fewer in number than anyone expected, given the…
Michelle LaBrosse
When you run a small business (perhaps as small as just you), does failure ever really occur? I hear often in the media about this or that business being “too big to fail,” but in reality isn't it more like “too small to fail?”
I ask myself this question, more rhetorically than anything. I’ve…
Mike Micklewright
In October 2014, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer. In November 2015, footage of the shooting was released and has been viewed all over the world. The footage shows an aggressive attack by a police officer, a supposed person of service to the community, as…
Kevin Meyer
My lean journey of more than 20 years has changed my life in many ways, perhaps none as pervasively as recognition of and disdain for waste.
Along with respect for people, waste awareness has changed my career, leadership style, and personal life. Observing waste has led to a life of increasing…
Bruce Hamilton
Mel Brooks fans will remember Spaceballs, his jocular jibe at the Star Wars franchise. In pursuit of a rebel ship, evil Lord Dark Helmet (played by Rick Moranis) orders his crew to accelerate their craft beyond the speed of light to “ludicrous speed.”
Although time travel remains within the…
Bob Emiliani
Every day, thousands of people confuse lean management with “Taylorism,” properly known as scientific management. The negative association brings out the lean bigwigs and others who work hard to create a great separation between lean and Frederick Winslow Taylor. This is an ill-informed and…
Mike Micklewright
To many people, the relationship between daily kaizen and statistical process control (SPC) might seem as remote as the relationship between a kangaroo and the past iconic American TV series Friends. And yet, a kangaroo and Friends have a commonality in that each contains a “Joey.” Daily kaizen…
Bruce Hamilton
A piece of popular lore, provided by Shigeo Shingo, is that the original name for mistake-proofing (poka-yoke) was actually fool-proofing (baka-yoke). Shingo chided managers at Panasonic for using the latter term, as it disrespected workers by essentially calling them fools.
Shingo substituted…
John Hunter
I have discussed steps to take to build a culture of continuous improvement in numerous posts on my Curious Cat Management Improvement blog. What it boils down to is building a system that supports that culture. Your culture is the result, not your aim.
David Heinemeier Hansson put it well…
Bruce Hamilton
In 1987, shortly after I became a manufacturing manager, the shop foreman at the time warned me about a young assembler. “Watch out for Michael,” the foreman said. “He tends to bend the rules. You may need to talk to him.”
In fact, I did watch Michael, and it did appear that he approached his…
Brian Maskell
Companies that are seriously pursuing the lean journey soon find their accounting, control, and measurement systems need to change to support the new strategy. The principles and methods of lean thinking and practice are quite different from traditional business and therefore require different…
Kevin Meyer
“If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.” —Thomas Merton, Love and Living
Sometimes there are dots just waiting to be connected....
I was rather surprised when Pope Francis mentioned Thomas…
Brian Maskell
I work with companies that are serious about being lean organizations. Most of them use lean accounting. It’s not about changing your accounting system. It’s about embracing lean principles and methods. Lean changes the way people look at management accounting. Here are 10 things to think about.…
Mike Micklewright
Finally... the new version of ISO 9001:2015 has been released. I can hear many of you screaming, “Hurray!” Or not. More realistically, I’m sure many of you living in the kaizen world are thinking, “Yeah, so what? This stuff has nothing to do with real kaizen, and in fact, it often creates…
Bob Emiliani
During the early days, late 1970s to late 1980s, there existed just a few small organizations to help people learn about and implement Toyota’s production system (TPS). They were led by people with decades of hand-on practice at Toyota and its affiliated companies. Some organizations, however,…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
As a sort of character-building exercise, I recently opened an unsolicited email from my health insurance provider. I was intent on doing a quick purge of sham, spam, and flimflam, and I figured this one would be no different. But I also know I’m biased against health insurers, so I decided to set…
Bob Emiliani
There are many ways to improve your thinking skills. One way is by practicing critical thinking. Teachers require their students, from elementary school on through college and graduate school, to do research to gather information, analyze the validity of data, determine the strengths and…
Ryan E. Day
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Mike Micklewright
I mean it! If your company can’t master 5S, try “1S” and stop! Stop the entire lean transformation until 5S is mastered in at least one process-focused area of the facility.
It’s a tremendous waste for a company to spend thousands, if not millions, of dollars on a “lean transformation” only to…
Mike Richman
Of all the tools in the lean toolkit, 5S is the one that has proven to be the most effective—and also the most elusive. It’s effective because the actions needed to sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain mirror the deeper, critically important philosophy of thinking about value, waste…
Mike Micklewright
You’ve heard of Bam Bam, Duran Duran, Zsa Zsa, so-so, tutu, and Reverend Tutu. And now we have... Gemba Gemba! But what is Gemba Gemba?
Quite simply, Gemba Gemba means going to the gemba for the purpose of observing others going to the gemba to ask, teach, learn, coach, and challenge. In this way…
Bob Emiliani
As both a participant and witness to the practice of lean management in higher education, I’d like to point out methodological errors in relation to how lean is practiced in industry.
People in industry who practice lean management correctly provide us with a standard to which we can compare the…