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What is “true cost”?

Lean can certainly help in getting commitment on specific financial targets and seeing that these targets are met on schedule, but not in the way one thinks, which is again one of the interesting paradoxes of this new way of […]

15 March 2015 / article
The enterprise as a flow of ideas

For better or for worse, our thinking is, to a large extent, the result of our conditioning, a reaction of our memory. For centuries, leaders ordered, others obeyed. Then, with the advent of corporations, experts thought, others executed. These modes […]

12 March 2015 / article
Are you ready for lean?

So many express their commitment to lean, yet so few carry it out? Why? Lean is not for everybody. Lean initiative after lean initiative we find that some prerequisites can’t be worked around: Are you serious about becoming better? Or […]

8 March 2015 / article
5 biggest mistakes to hinder a lean startup

Lean is not that hard, to be honest—you just need to get a few things right. First, every customer matters, and quality is about delivering to customer preferences as opposed to fitting the customer in your processes. Second, if you […]

25 February 2015 / article
True lean leadership at all levels by Michael Ballé, Daniel Jones and Mike Orzen

Our world has become fluid: everything changes all the time at the pace of a Twitter feed. Being the gray-suited company representative of a well thought of institution simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Success now hinges on personal leadership: persuading […]

16 February 2015 / article
Face your problems, then learn to solve them

Lean management is teaching the right people to solve the right problems the right way. None of this is easy. Senior management must agree to teach, not tell; middle managers must agree to learn. This is not easy and win/win […]

2 February 2015 / article
How do we help our plant managers want to do Lean?

We’ve just changed our divisional general manager and the new boss wants our lean approach to be less directive and more participative. That is to say, our plant managers should want to do lean instead of feeling that they are […]

26 January 2015 / article
Show me the money

Lean in short is this: customer satisfaction derives from employee satisfaction, or, to be more specific, satisfying customers (in their varied preferences) requires personal job fulfillment and continuous learning. In this day and age, few people would dispute any of […]

21 January 2015 / article
Pull is the architecture for continuous improvement

Seventeen years ago, when I first saw a Toyota sensei come to a supplier, he went to a workstation in front of the assembled executive group, and watched the operator work for about ten minutes, before moving a box of […]

21 January 2015 / article

Leading author, speaker and researcher, I work on both the "hard" (improve quality, reduce lead-time, eliminate waste) and "soft" (engage people in problem-solving and improvement to develop them to the fullest of their abilities) dimensions of Lean transformation.

I started studying improvement initiatives twenty years ago as part of my PhD. research on Mental Models. I was persuaded by Toyota engineers that to understand lean you had to practice it firsthand and I have been working with supervisors, site managers and now CEOs to leverage their lean efforts into market share, people engagement and bottom line results. You don't know what you don't know and the most surprising thing I've learned as a cognitive sociologist is the value of: see with your feet and think with your hands!

I co-founded the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France. I have written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored three business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine, one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager, and a novel about Lean practice, Lead with Respect as well as a Lean manual in French, Le Management Lean.