Mike Rother sent out an email today pointing out that the Lean Enterprise Institute’s web site now has a Toyota Kata page. I believe this is a significant event for the lean community as a whole, as well as for the LEI. As many of my regular readers know, I have maintained the view that [...]
A great insight from a client today. The target condition at this point is simply to establish some degree of transparency of the current condition on a status board without having to resort to probing questions to elicit what is working, and what is not. The observation was: “We’ll know we are succeeding when we [...]
Coincidently my experience this week ties in nicely to the last post. I have a couple of teams working to develop pull systems through their respective work areas. The conventional approach (I suppose) is a lot of PowerPoint about kanban, some exercises, developing a future state value stream map, then devising an implementation plan. An [...]
This post rambles a bit, and wraps up a few concepts. It was, however, inspired by a recent interview of Mike Rother on Lean Nation. (See below) One of the many good points that struck me was that you can’t rally around an ROI. Yet companies try to do just that. They set something ROI [...]
Vance left a really good comment on the recent Travel Tales post. He said, in part: Having worked in the airline business, it’s really a matter of having employees that CARE (most due to their own pride, not by management) We many times had weather and mis-connected passengers to deal with. It only took a [...]
Chapter 3 of The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership is titled “Coach and Develop Others.” Where in Chapter 2 the authors were outlining the individual leader’s responsibility for self-development, now they are describing the environment and the process of supporting and focusing that drive. Rather than just outline the chapter, I want to dig into some [...]
It must be that time of the year. I see traffic in the online forums asking about how to set key performance indicators for lean staff people so their performance incentives can be set. If anyone were to ask my advice here, it comes down to one word: Don’t. Two reasons. First, we have overwhelming [...]
How many “If-Then” steps do your team members have to deal with in the course of their routine work? Every one of those branch points is a decision. It is a point where the team member must memorize decision criteria and the correct choice(s). Each “If-Then” in the process flow potentially doubles the number of [...]
Today’s Dilbert strip highlights a situation that is only funny because it happens so often: The idea that a company can focus on 25 key areas, or 125 key performance indicators (yes, I said 125 because I have seen it myself) is obviously ludicrous. Of course a manager has a legitimate concern to ensure people [...]
The introduction of The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership covers ground that: Has been covered before – we know all of this. Needs to be covered again, because most people act as though we don’t know it. Simply put, Liker and Convis (legitimately) feel the need, once again, to let us know the things which [...]