Anyone who is following this blog knows my view of “engaged leadership.” As I read this book, I had two experiences. I found it validating. There were a lot of times I said “oh yeah!” I found it clarifying. Rother turns up the contrast on a couple of crucial points and I liked that. This [...]
In a recent blog post, Why C level executives don’t engage in ‘lean’…, Steven Spear makes a really interesting observation. He cites two main reasons. 1) “Lean” is regarded as a tool kit. There has already been a lot written here, and elsewhere, on this fallacy and how it continues to be propagated. Spear’s most [...]
Robert Cenek offers up a succinct “check” for the level of a leader’s commitment to a change initiative on his blog. The element that resonates with my own experience is the first on on his list: Intellectual curiosity. I cannot say enough how much core difference there is between a leadership team who says they [...]
The idea of a continuous improvement culture, a problem solving culture, a kaizen culture, has been with us for decades. Ultimately it is what everyone says they want to create. Yet creating that culture remains elusive for all but a few. I have noticed that, generally, when people describe the culture they are trying to [...]
Now and again someone wonders out loud why, in this lexicon of Japanese terms, we have the word “takt.” I had always passed along what I had heard – that the word was German, short for taktzeit and used in their factories to represent the pace of production. During WWII, the Germans had helped the [...]
I wanted to pass along this press release from the Lean Enterprise Institute. I will be getting a copy and post a review after I actually read it. One thing I am going to be looking for is how the proposed model implements PDCA to drive continuous improvement. There are lots of good schemes for [...]
A great key point comes out on page 124 of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother. …a Toyota person once told me to focus on the biggest problem. However, when I tried to do this I noticed a negative effect: We got lost in hunting for and discussing what was the biggest problem. When we tried [...]
I am in the process of (finally!) reading Mike Rother’s great book Toyota Kata. The book has already gotten great reviews out there, and I am not going to contribute a lot more to that dialog except to say I think it is the first substantial addition to community knowledge about TPS since Steven Spear [...]
W. Edwards Deming espouses a “system of profound knowledge” as the way to manage complex systems. The key points are: Appreciation for a system. (Systems thinking) Knowledge about variation. (Knowing the difference between variation inherent in the system and variation with an attributable cause.) Theory of knowledge. (Understanding how the organization learns – summarized as [...]
Popular Mechanics online has a nice little article describing how the infamous accelerator pedal actually works. I am posting the link here so that we might be better informed when fielding the inevitable questions that seem to come the way of “lean experts.” http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/how_to/4347704.html