Lean leadership means achieving your goals by developing people, teaching them to create more value and learn to eliminate waste
Let’s take care of the sick first, yes? They need care. So let’s take care of the care providers, yes? They need material and emotional support to do their jobs – masks for protection, gel for disinfection, respirators for the […]
Lean thinkers, the first question is what can we do to create psychological safety for people affected so that they feel enabled to be cautious and break the chain of transmission? But a second crisis is looming that we, lean […]
Lean is a verb, not a thing. Lean is the act of looking for waste, then asking why it’s there, then committing to do something about it, getting others onboard, and trying something. My son leaned us when he pointed out […]
A dubious privilege of being a business writer is that people talk to me. People who do the work talk to me. Their bosses talk to me. I get to hear both sides of the story, which is fascinating and, […]
I often get asked “how do you move from gemba coaching to executive coaching?” which I find kind of surprising because the whole point of executive coaching is to get execs to the gemba, looking into the details, discussing with […]
Lean started with Kanban, and Kanban is a trust machine. There are four elements elements to Kanban: a Heijunka board reflecting takt time, the Kanban cards, a shop stock, and component Kanbans. You might have come across the short animations […]
We’re burning the planet – I think we all realize that by now. We know the how – too much production of greenhouse gases, too much production of heat through energy use, too much use of natural rare resources. We […]
In the old days, when I watched Toyota sensei help their suppliers with quality issues, the first question they’d ask was: “have you checked the materials?” Or “can we see your ordering pattern?” It always wrong-footed everybody. In a worldview […]
I continue to be amazed by the fact that executives who are genuinely interested in figuring out “lean” have spectacular results with it, while those who want to use lean to fix performance problems in their processes fail within two […]
Okay… it’s taken me something like 20 years but I’ve finally connected some dots. Lean thinking works, lean thinking is hard. Here’s why. One of the main themes of my doctoral research, in the previous century, was the “law of […]
