I have posted a few times about the “management by measurement” culture and how destructive it can be. This TED video by Daniel Pink adds some color to the conversation. Simply put, while traditional “incentives” tend to work well when the task is rote and the solution is well understood, applying those same incentives to [...]
I was cleaning out some old stuff and came across a folded piece of paper with notes on it. They were from my parting comments to a kaizen event team that had put in a great week with spectacular results. They had started out wanting to improve the delivery of WIP to and from the [...]
Gipsie Ranney is a consultant with The Deming Cooperative. A white paper she recently wrote, contrasting NUMMI with The Big Three, has been circulating by email. I requested, and received, her permission to publish it here. Remembering NUMMI Gipsie B. Ranney January, 2009 The discussions of a bailout for the U.S. owned auto industry – [...]
One of the popular buzzwords floating around out there right now is "servant leadership." Like all buzzwords, it is easy to say, and easy to subjugate. One of the best terms I have heard that helps set the thinking is "span of support." Normally leader-to-lead rations are discussed in terms of "span of control." By [...]
There has been an uptick in chatter about “lean certifications” in various forums lately. For anyone considering getting some kind of certification, I’d like to pose some things to think about, especially before you pay a lot of money to someone to “certify you.” There is no standard definition of what “lean” is. Anyone claiming [...]
On the backside of this site, I get information about things like the search terms that brought people here. One caught my eye today.. “lean refutation.” Since this site comes up as the 121st item in the Google search, I think I am safe to conclude that the person intended “lean manufacturing” to be the [...]
Get to the root cause by “Asking Why?” five times. We have all heard it, read it. Our sensei’s have pounded it into us. It is a cliché, obviously, since getting to the root cause of a problem is (most of the time) a touch more complicated than just repeatedly asking “Why?” Isn’t it? Maybe [...]
How can some companies not only survive, but thrive when operating in “high cost labor” areas, while others are struggling even as they are busy chasing the lowest possible costs? I would like to suggest that one key difference is the attitude toward people. On the one hand is the “people as cost” model. This [...]
I have been in, or encountered, a number of organizations which had (or were working on) ISO-900x quality registrations. While I am fully aware of the intent of the ISO requirements, in the cases I have seen, the effect seems to fall well short of the goal. On the surface, the types of processes mandated [...]
“Stop the line if there is a problem” is a common mantra of lean manufacturing. But it is harder than first imagined to actually implement. The management mindset that “production must continue, no matter what” is usually the first obstacle. But even when that is overcome, I have seen two independent cases where peer social [...]