I attended a talk in 2006 given by a world leader in quality that contained a bar graph summary ranking 21 U.S. counties from best to worst (see figure 1).

Lean thinkers see the waste in health care when they are at the hospital gemba. I think this is true whether you are a lean person who is new to health care or if you’re a long-time hospital person who has learned lean.

I am in Japan helping to lead one of our lean manufacturing benchmarking trips.

Students of CEED—an Australia-based program that links university engineering students with industry and government companies to complete specific on-site projects as part of their studies—are contributing significantly to the success of manufacturing projects, incl

During my recent travels, I have noticed an increasing tendency toward formalizing organizational quality improvement (QI) efforts into a separate silo. Even more disturbing is an increasing (and excruciating) formality.

Leaders lead. Or do they? There is not always a cause-and-effect relationship between leadership actions and follower behavior. Not all leaders succeed at pulling people along in the same direction.

Last month I wrote about how the random sampling distribution (RSD) of various sample statistics are the basis for pretty much everything in statistics.

In my August column, “How to Turn Capability Indexes Into Dollars,” I defined the effective cost of production and use and showed how it can be obtained directly from the capability

Whether I am speaking about lean to an audience of one or 100, if the conversation goes on long enough the question inevitably arises: “What’s next for lean?” I always manage an answer, typically tying it to the theme of the discussion, speech, or intended teaching

“To effect the economies, to bring in the power, to cut out the waste, and thus to fully realize the wage motive, we must have big business – which does not, however, necessarily mean centralized business. We are decentralizing.”