On Monday MIT hosted a webinar with Steven Spear on the topic of “Creative Experimentation.” A key theme woven throughout Spear’s work is the world today is orders of magnitude more complex than it was even 10 or 15 years ago. Where, in the past, it was feasible for a single person or small group [...]
Note – this post was written pretty much simultaneously with a post on the lean.org forum. Mike Rother has put up a compelling presentation that highlights a long-standing misunderstanding about the purpose of “standards.” Some time ago, a (well-meaning) author or consultant constructed a graphic that shows the PDCA wheel rolling up the incline of [...]
Yesterday, Kris left great comment with a compelling link to a TED presentation by Tom Wujec, a fellow at Autodesk. Back in June, I commented on Steve Spear’s article “ Why C-Level Executives Don’t Engage in Lean Initiatives.” In that commentary, Spear contends that business leaders are simply not taught the skills and mindset [...]
Over the decades, I have observed that it is quite common for organizational leaders to try to use the word “opportunity” when talking about a problem. I can understand the desire to do this – we typically think of “problems” as something to do with people. But I find the emphamistic language… problematic. [...]
On the way to the airport a few days ago a couple of thoughts occurred to me that I wanted to toss out there and see how you all responded. This is one of them. What separates an expert from a master? Actually I need to ask in more prejudicial terms. Some people who are [...]
Grassroots Innovation: The 3rd Way. Greg captures a concept in 183 words that entire books have utterly failed to explain. When we are trying to solve a problem, there are always people involved. And people have positions, feelings, and are always emotionally tied to this-or-that outcome. It is critically important to find “The 3rd Way” [...]
Last week I posted a story of a failed freezer, ruined food, and a customer support experience that could be summed up as “That’s how we do it.” I invited comments and asked: “Is this a problem?” And when I say “problem” I mean, is this a “problem” from the standpoint of the company’s internal [...]
Not many people know that Amazon.com is one of the “places to see” if you are looking for companies practicing the TPS. The fact that their sales and profits are hitting records as most others are scratching and clawing to stay in business is telling. This recent post by Kevin Kelleher on Gigacom really sums [...]
A couple of posts ago, I tried to emphasize “hypothesis testing” as the key, core thinking behind the TPS. For that matter, I think that anyone who truly understands any of the various improvement approaches out there will find the same thinking at the core. Certainly Six Sigma; Theory of Constraints; and TQM are all [...]
In the world of science, great discoveries simplify our understanding. When Copernicus hypothesized that everything in the universe does not revolve around the Earth, explaining the motions of things in the sky got a lot easier. In general, I have found that if something requires a great deal of detail to explain the fundamentals, there [...]
