Lean leadership means achieving your goals by developing people, teaching them to create more value and learn to eliminate waste
Reduce your carbon impact by half. In the worst market conditions in living memory. Without investment. This is what this mid-sized construction company has done, cutting its carbon footprint by 47% in four years whilst fighting for survival in a sector […]
The Lean focus on “problem solving” can easily be misunderstood as eliminating all problems from the process. From a mechanistic perspective, the “Lean as operational excellence” dream is that if we take all the problems out of the process, as […]
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have written a thoughtful argument explaining why some nations prosper while others fail. Some institutions, they claim, are inclusive – with incentives towards success, encouragement of innovation and sharing opportunities with all that participate. Others […]
Life is messy, complex and pulls you into all directions at once. We well know that our path of least resistance is to deal with daily stuff so as to stay in the same spot – and hope to get […]
Engineers are smart and self-motivated. Give them a problem, they’ll solve it. But don’t give them context, chances are that they’ll remove their difficulties by changing things around – sometimes touching stuff they should have been careful with. Problem solving […]
Some ideas are sticky, and none more so that ideas about ideas. The rough consensus since the 1920s is that creative insights occur during the free-flowing, loose-association thought process when one tries to solve a challenging problem. Creativity is sparked […]
If we don’t pay attention, it’s easy to treat everything as a transaction: tick the box, plug the number in the excel sheet, get the work done. Do you hear yourself telling someone “just do your job!” Or does your […]
Takehiko Harada, in his great Management Lessons from Taiichi Ohno, tells us that another way of looking at the Toyota Production System is as “abnormality management.” Abnormality management means that: Abnormalities are visible and intuitive and management encourages revealing them […]
Let’s conduct a quick thought experiment. Imagine for a second: You are given the power to know the solution to all the world’s problems: it won’t make you a hero. It’ll make you a sad know-it-all no one even listens […]
The psychological theory that has gained visibility in the past decades is Carol Dweck’s distinction between growth mindset and fixed mindset – where we all have a bit of both. Growth mindset is the assumption that practice makes perfect, and […]
