Mark Graban was an early blogger in the Lean community, publishing Leanblog.org. He was a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award for his book, Lean Hospitals. Mark was one of the first people to create a specialty version of Lean, applicable to the healthcare industry. He is a consultant, speaker, Read more…
Eliyahu Moshe Goldratt (March 31, 1947 – June 11, 2011) was a thought leader during the early development of Lean thinking. His ideas were not actually presented as Lean, though. He focused more on his own ideas, primarily the “Theory of Constraints” and drum-buffer-rope. His basic premise was that you Read more…
Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900 – December 20, 1993) was an early thought leader on modern continuous improvement. He is known for many things but is probably best known for two specific achievements. The first is that he is closely linked to the revival of the Japanese economy after World Read more…
The term ‘Natural Born Leader’ is a myth. You aren’t born with leadership skills. You may be born attractive, tall, muscular. You may be gifted by your parents with a brain that fires a lot more neurons than the typical person. Of course, you also may be born to end Read more…
Spend more than 5 minutes with a Lean consultant, and you will hear about building a “continuous improvement culture.” That’s because it is one of the bedrocks of any philosophy about improving an organization. You’ve got to have people committed to change, that believe in the tools to make change Read more…
One of the things I teach people when doing data collection and analysis is to be suspicious whenever anything unexpected happens. If you suddenly see a major uptick in your productivity numbers or a monumental drop in your defect rate, make sure you understand why, or it WILL come back Read more…
There’s a common question among people new to Lean. As they become familiar with what this continuous improvement philosophy has to offer, they realize that it will also come at a steep cost in terms on the investment of time. They realize that there is a lot of learning and Read more…
I was taking a break recently and was perusing my FaceBook feed. One post in particular caught my attention. “Anyone know how to blog successfully?” Without stating the obvious, since you are reading this on what I like to think is a blog with at least a shred of success, Read more…
One of the great things about Lean is that it is chock full of tools. Unfortunately, this can also create a problem for some people. Because there are so many great tools, they immediately reach for one of those tools before really thinking about the problem they are facing. In Read more…
I just saw a rather interesting article on Elon Musk’s rules for meetings on Business Insider.
One of the most commonly told stories about Lean is of the chalk circle. Taiichi Ohno, the father of modern Lean, would draw a circle on the floor in chalk and tell his engineers or managers to stand in it to watch an operation. His instruction was simply “Watch.” After Read more…
In good Lean operations, blame is never the goal of problem-solving efforts. It is sometimes a byproduct, as, on occasion, the facts lead you to a specific person. But even then, in most cases, their shortcomings are the result of either a poor process or poor training. True people problems Read more…