The Most Motivating Way…
"It turns out that the most motivating way in which people can be involved with their workplace is the improvement of their own work processes." Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation…
Improving Our Work…and Improving My Blog!
(See below for how I plan to improve my blog posts.) What is an "Improvement?" An improvement is a CHANGE that makes our work easier, safer, faster, or better quality.…
The “Deeper Challenge” in Lean
"We have also discovered that, behind all the tools for operational excellence and the different management system needed to support their use, lies a much deeper challenge: to develop the…
Welcoming Problems?!
"A Lean thinker is interested in and in a way even welcomes (if not joyfully) the appearance of interruptions, anomalies, and problems in his or her process as opportunities to…
The Most Motivating Way
"It turns out that the most motivating way in which people can be involved with their workplace is the improvement of their own work processes." Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation…
The Benefit of Kaizen (Improvement)
"The real benefit of a kaizen effort goes way beyond the performance improvement you (almost) always get. The value lies in the learning for the team (they learn how to…
Is “Old Thinking” the Problem?
"Business authors sometimes suggest that well-established, successful companies decline, while newer companies do well, because the new companies are not encumbered by an earlier, outmoded way of thinking. On the…
Is it a Factory? …or a BRAIN?
"What is so striking about Toyota's Georgetown factory is, in fact, that it only looks like a car factory. It's really a big brain—a kind of laboratory focused on a…
More Standards = More Creativity??
"The paradox of Lean is that the more structure and standards you have in place, the more flexible and creative you can become." Flatlined: Why Lean Transformations Fail and What…
The key to “begin continuous improvement”
"The establishment of standardized processes and procedures is the greatest key to creating consistent performance. It is only when the process is stable that you can begin the creative progression…