Category Archives: Interesting Reading

Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard

I have been touting Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch for some time now, so it I thought I ought to actually write about why. If you are in the role of a “change agent” this book is your manual. Up to this point, the bible for “organizational change” has been John P. Kotter’s book [...]

Lego Moonshine

In the Production Preparation Process (3P) we use the term “moonshine” to refer to process of rapid prototyping and iteration. The team creates concepts and tries them out quickly and cheaply in order to learn more. Today we have some really powerful tools available to do this. One of them is Lego Technic. It is [...]

Outsourcing Competence

Continuing on a supply-chain theme from Doing Outsourcing Right and Don’t Lose How To Make Things, I found this Reuters article carried on MSNBC interesting. Surging China costs forces some U.S. manufacturing companies back home   Like a lot of popular press articles, the title and even the lead kind of miss the point. They [...]

Nancy Bruner: “Do They Really Want a Change Agent?”

Nancy Bruner blogs on Word | Rap. Her first (and as of this writing, only) post is titled Do They Really Want a Change Agent. Since most lean practitioners are, rightly or wrongly, expected to be change agents, the points she makes caught my eye. The harsh reality of this is summed up in her [...]

Toyota Kata Handbook

Mike Rother has made some significant revisions to his Improvement Kata Handbook.   The role of “True North” is much better defined as the context of improvement. He has filled in a lot of valuable detail for “Grasping the Current Condition” and setting Target Conditions. The structure for the PDCA cycle has been tightened up. [...]

WWII Visual Control

PC posted a really interesting bit of visual control history in the forums. Click on the link to read his whole post, there is a second part about lack of visual controls. In a recently aired episode of Showdown: Air Combat the host, a USAF fighter jock, asked about a series of colored stripes painted on [...]

What Do You Teach and Practice Every Day?

Mike Rother forwarded this link to an article by Bruce Hamilton in Quality Digest with the observation that “the lean ship may be turning.” The key point is that people learn what they practice. And if you practice kaizen every day, you learn kaizen. But if you practice something else every day, you learn that. [...]

Toyota Under Fire

So many of us were wringing our hands a year ago. Our idealized vision of Toyota as the source of all perfection and example was tarnished and crumbling before our eyes. Prominent “names” in our field were talking about the need to go beyond Toyota. The vaunted TPS was clearly failing. Or was it? Like [...]

The Flow of Improvement

Mike Rother shared an overview presentation on the “Improvement Kata.”   Introduction to the Improvement Kata View more presentations from Mike Rother. The words on one graphic really jumped out at me: Aside from his intended point that you never get good at anything but “business as usual” if “business as usual” is what you [...]

Biggest ERP Failures of 2010

pc pointed out a great little article in a post on the discussion forum. The article touches lightly on why ERP implementations are so hazard prone, and then lists the “Biggest Failures” of 2010. Of note is that the majority of the listed failures are governments. I can see why. Governments, by their nature, have [...]