Lean leadership means achieving your goals by developing people, teaching them to create more value and learn to eliminate waste
Lean thinking essentially means constantly looking for ways to increase customer value by decreasing waste caused to the customer by our own processes. It means constantly looking for ways employees can increase the value they contribute by eliminating wasteful work […]
There are two ways of looking at this: one, applying lean thinking to the sales function, or two, increasing sales with lean. As I don’t know much about selling, I’ll tackle the latter – how can lean boost sales without […]
After practicing Lean for 20 years, first as a researcher, then as a workshop consultant, then in building large corporate programs with Freddy and now as a CEO coach, I’ve been reflecting on how I approach lean – particularly since, […]
As time goes by fact becomes legend and legend becomes myth. Takt time is one of the core concepts of lean, which origins are now misted in myth – uncertain and unknowable, but thought-provoking anyhow. Legend has it that Ohno […]
Lean is a heartfelt commitment to completely eliminate waste from work. The biggest waste being failed relationships and dumb decisions, lean isn’t about slash and burn cost reduction, it’s about creating a kinder, wiser work environment where every person has […]
The first thing his sensei told my father when they started working together was that the great weakness of TPS was that it rested entirely on the plant managers. Years later, this statement turns out to be confirmed, time and […]
A few lean ideas have indeed spread well beyond the lean movement. “Batch is bad and flow is good” is still hard to do in practice, but is no longer disputed. Improvement (whatever that means!) is a key part of […]
The first key to lean is leadership, the second leadership and the third… leadership. But a very special and specific kind of leadership. Of all the quirks of the lean thinking the one that has always fascinated me is “problems […]
Corporate functions were invented on the Taylorist notion that engineers devise the best system which is then taught to assembly line workers. As far as it goes, it makes sense, but what applied to immigrant manual labor in the late […]
A true lean transformation relies on the engagement of all people all the time or, as the lean masters taught us, on “developing the kaizen mind in every employee rather than applying improvement tools to every process.” Kaizen is the […]
