Lean leadership means achieving your goals by developing people, teaching them to create more value and learn to eliminate waste
During my two last gemba visits in two different companies, the HR Director was with the leader on the shop floor. This is a major step forward. What are the deep roots that will, in time produce more competitive products? How […]
How do you survive doing something with very high stakes at which you absolutely suck? We’ve just had our fifth Lean Summit here in France with fantastic speakers, a fantastic audience, fantastic support team (I love you guys) and, if I’m to […]
Whether you believe in science or not, science doesn’t care I grew up professionally in a world obsessed with performance improvement – maybe too much so. The talk at conference was always about: what worked what didn’t work did what […]
Is Lean about process improvement? Or customer satisfaction improvement? Or is it about creating a learning system? Or cost reduction in the end? What do we really look for at the gemba. Usual entry points into lean thinking are: Improve […]
When engineers face a quality problem, they tend to start with the last operation. If something’s wrong with a part made of plastic components, the engineer will look at final assembly first, and make his or her ways backwards to find […]
“I’m completely confused,” concluded a participant at a recent workshop on Lean thinking – as if this was a bad thing. Staying perplexed as long as we can is, surprisingly, a good thing. In the workshop, participants were asked to build […]
“Where do I start with lean?” I am often asked. How do I eradicate waste from my processes? How do I reduce costs? How do I improve flow? Why not start by asking “why?”? Yes, productivity is wealth. Yes, the […]
A large part of the quality of what we do is down to work habits. We can see this everyday: some people have good work habits, and work well. Others have poor work habits, and don’t work so well. Some […]
The lean approach to sales is seeing customers as friends: we help them get done what they want to get done, with the lowest cost and hassle possible, they help us stay in business by accepting our prices. But how does […]
Toyota’s Thinking People System continues to amaze me. To prepare for tomorrow’s gemba visit of one of their sites, the CEO and COO of this service company used the TPS House to draw the list of challenges they needed to […]
