Lean leadership means achieving your goals by developing people, teaching them to create more value and learn to eliminate waste
The deep purpose of lean thinking is to benefit society by growing sustainable and profitable companies that continuously strive to satisfy their customers more completely. The trick to doing this is to focus every person in the company in figuring […]
“A good movie is three good scenes, no bad scenes,” once quipped Howard Hawks. The Corolla’s first Chief Engineer established the doctrine of “80 points + alpha.” The idea is that, in developing a new products there are 80 points […]
These days, the rage in lean is all about “management system”, “hoshin kanri” or “standard work.” Where is kaizen gone? In the last conference I attended, three people independently quoted Taiichi Ohno reportedly saying “without standards, there can be no […]
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 […]
Sometimes, business is tough. Sometimes, products are undersold, markets reverse, competition is unduly aggressive. Sometimes core technologies change. When the company hits troubled waters, people can find themselves working very hard just to stay afloat, stuck in a “Red Queen” […]
Lean is a clever scaffolding that points people towards continuous improvement and, if they work together, superior performance. But how does performance improvement really work? At individual level? The traditional operational excellence view of improvement is to avoid mistakes. Most […]
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 […]
When the CEO and COO of this service company heard that the key to improve their financial performance was to reduce their inventory of spare parts, they were a somewhat doubtful: their business is maintenance of gas stations and spare parts […]
People keep asking: What are the five steps to lean so we can get started with lean right away without having to learn the whole thirty-years-to-make-a-sensei shebang? We keep answering: there are no “five steps”, lean is organic, it’s not […]
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 […]
