Lean leadership means achieving your goals by developing people, teaching them to create more value and learn to eliminate waste
Lean was born of the discovery in the late 1980s that Toyota outperformed all its competitors in all dimensions – not just one, but all. Thirty years later (30!) Toyota is still outperforming its competition whilst having produced the single […]
Why do entrepreneurs succeed, and then their companies fail? Or conversely, why do so many dominant companies keep succeeding although their customers hate them while new competitors never take off? There is an inherent contradiction is any human organization since – well, […]
If teams and team leaders are the basic building blocs of lean, the atoms, how can I become better at leading teams? This is a question I get often, and as a leader of informal teams in the lean movement, […]
Another day, another conference, and again the same debate… what is lean? We are collectively so deeply conditioned by taylorism/fayolism that people present without a second thought “lean manufacturing?” “lean development,” “lean IT”, lean this and that. They are showing […]
Kata is a Japanese word for a detailed set of choreographed movements: it’s the way we do things. It’s not a rule. It’s not a program. It’s the best of of our knowledge at a given time. Sure, a kata is […]
In many ways, Lean is about developing a culture of autonomous problem solvers – but, what, exactly, do we mean by “solving a problem”? A problem is when a mishap in the normal process leads to a gap in performance. An unexpected […]
Practicing lean changes radically how managers manage. I am fortunate in seeing this transformation firsthand every day, and here are 3 clear changes with huge impacts on management outcomes. As managers learn lean thinking, you can see their management practice […]
Learning means making changes in how you work separating the helpful from the unhelpful, the impactful from the indifferent, adopting the helpful moves that matter and move on to the next change. So many people look for the “secret ingredient” […]
When designing a new product, start with customer flow and teardown. When I sit on in product design meetings, most of the discussion is about how to make this or that function work and how to assemble the functions so […]
