One of the advantages of having a business performance blog is I have a ready place to rant complain share my customer experiences with the air travel industry. It all started Monday. I had a flight from Seattle to Raleigh-Durham NC, connecting in Newark. It was only a two day trip, so I was traveling [...]
Happy New Year for the Year of the Dragon to all of my Chinese friends around the world. January 23 is the New Year. This message is timed to appear at midnight, Beijing time, as the fireworks are reaching a crescendo. I look at the time I spent in China as a period of great [...]
Though I have some reservations (see below), this video shows a lot of good examples of flow for final assembly – only the assembly line is vertical, and the product is a 30 story hotel. The video actually repeats twice, once with a music sound track, then a second time with no sound. The Good [...]
This is of no particular interest to anyone but those of us who spent time working “in the yellow box.” Tonight the Megamillions jackpot is $206 million dollars. Eastman Kodak’s (at $0.69 / share) market cap is $186 million. Though Kodak is mostly known as a (former) consumer products brand, today most, if not all, [...]
This has nothing to do with lean production except at the touch point of the customer experience. Mrs. LeanThinker was looking for a replacement for her well-worn 5 quart stock pot. We were in Macy’s home department browsing. She found one she really liked, a Circulon Symmetry model, full retail $140, sale priced at $69.95. [...]
One of the catch phrases in the Toyota culture is “the art of making things.” Everything I have read, and everyone I know who has worked there suggests that “making things” is a passion there that goes beyond a means to make money. In today’s finance / MBA driven world, I think too many companies [...]
I got a call this morning asking if I could fill in for a speaker who couldn’t make it. If you are going to be at the SME Annual Meeting in Bellevue, WA this coming week, I’ll be at the Sunday program, and speaking at 10:00 on Tuesday morning. I’m still putting it together, but [...]
One of the most common (and frustrating) problems for the staff lean practitioner is being asked to “measure the savings” resulting from specific improvements. (This problem is related to, but different from, trying to measure “lean progress” or the status of implementation.) There are two issues in play here. First is the level of understanding [...]
In this TED video, Simon Sinek summarizes a key thing that differentiates an idea that catches on vs. one that plops. This is relevant to us at a couple of levels. First, as Sinek points out, truly great companies succeed because they stand for something higher. They have a “why” that drives what they do [...]
I wouldn’t normally post something like this, except for the subject matter: the Toyota assembly line in Valenciennes, France. Stéphane Couturier is a photographer who tries to capture urban and industrial scenes as organic living forms. Others have found strong metaphors between the Toyota Production System and the organization of natural processes, but these photographs [...]