Post Tagged with: "leadership"

Leaders make choices, managers take decisions

Choosing to quit smoking is one thing, deciding not to have that cigarette is another. Chasing is a lifestyle choice, an orientation that is going to make your life better. Decisions is picking one among several options at any one […]

29 April 2016 / article
First find a leader, then think about flow

This is probably the best example of kaizen I’ve ever seen so far: A few deep thoughts to think about: They don’t show you how to find a solution to the problem, they first tell you about George, his will […]

10 January 2016 / 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

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.