I was talking to a consulting client the other day, and mentioned that it would be helpful to use a video camera to record a secondary process that would affect a kaizen team’s decisions. This other location is quite a long ways away, so it would chew up a lot Read more…
I was watching Jon Stewart, where I get all my fake news from, and he had an interesting guest, Atul Gawande, the author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Now, if you’ve spent time looking at my site, you’ll know that I am a fan of checklists. Read more…
Improvement, by definition, requires altering behaviors. And since most people show a reluctance to change, it follows that improvement efforts can be an uphill battle. Let’s start by addressing 8 of the major reasons why people resist change. Fear. By far the biggest reason for resistance to change, fear creates Read more…
I just got back from doing some Lean training last week. I frequently return with a few pictures from my travels that are at least a little bit interesting. I apologize for the picture quality. Apparently, when the lens of your camera gets grimy, the pictures get worse. The first Read more…
SI.com recently ran an article about the ‘interception ladder’. It looked back at playoff games since 1970, and found an interesting statistic. With each interception a team throws (accidentally throwing to the guys in the wrong jersey) the chance that the team won dropped. Now, this is a classic case Read more…
Inspection and quality go together, right? Wrong! Conventional wisdom holds that inspection and quality go together like those other famous partnerships in the title. After all, there are mountains of books on how to create sampling plans to check quality with inspections, and nobody blinks an eye when there is Read more…
As I was packing to get ready for a training session, I came across a new dilemma. I recently switched back to using an electric razor. As I was contemplating where to pack it, it brought me back to a time, years ago, when I was a young lieutenant in Read more…
I am an aspiring golfer who plays less than half a dozen rounds of golf a year. (My translation of aspiring means I have been golfing for a long time without any real improvement.) To gain some perspective about my skills, the average golf score in the US right now Read more…
When planning a kaizen event, I use a trick to judge how well a leader knows his or her processes. I simply ask for a list of the cycle times. If the times all end in nice, neat numbers (:00, :15, :30, :45), I know they are just estimates, and Read more…
One of the harder things for people to do at work is to really cut their creativity loose. Industry as a whole tends to reward successful creativity, but when ideas, especially ones that have just a sprinkling of ‘crazy’ on top, don’t pan out, the person can be viewed in Read more…
I was watching a little TV to wind down this evening, and saw an interesting commercial from Domino’s. Apparently, the pizza franchise did a little restaurant kaizen and came up with a new recipe. I am sure restaurants are constantly tweaking their processes and their secret ingredients, but this is Read more…
I’m sure you’ve heard many different definitions about what the meaning of Lean is. The strictest meaning will likely center around creating flow, or will possibly mention inventory reduction. I, however, subscribe to a far broader meaning of Lean. I view it as any effort to reduce waste and improve Read more…