Fellow blogger Mark Grabon recently posted “
10 Things I Wish Lean Practitioners Wouldn’t Say in 2010” on his leanblog.org.
I like it enough that my thoughts won’t fit in an appropriate comment on his blog, so I’ll write them here. Go back and read his post first, though, or you won’t make sense of this one.
Added [...]
I am in the process of going through a lot of old files and filling up recycle bins. Most of this stuff was collected back in first half of the 1990’s when the world wide web was just gaining critical mass, and a half day on Alta Vista, or the brand new search engine, Google, [...]
Many pundits out there think the economy has hit bottom. If the last couple of cycles are any indication, when things start picking up again, it is going to happen fast. As people scramble to retain or gain market share they are going to want more and want it now.
And, if the last couple of [...]
“Sustaining the gains” is a frequent topic of discussion in the continuous improvement world. Often the discussion degenerates into a rant about “management commitment.”
But in the real world, people generally don’t sabotage improvements on purpose. (Though I have seen it happen, but only once.) The mechanism is far more subtle.
Before we get into what happens [...]
John Shook’s latest column on lean.org is titled “Was NUMMI a Success?” He adds some interesting thought to the mix of the ongoing post-mortem on GM and NUMMI.
John argues (successfully, I think) that Toyota’s objectives for NUMMI were to learn how to take their system outside of the safe cocoon of Toyota City in Japan; [...]
Although it caters to the I.T. community,
Tech Republic sometimes publishes pieces could have that have a wider application. Here are two of them.
In
Five ways of thinking that can fell I.T. leaders, author Ilya Bogorad lists some limiting beliefs that can result in the I.T. folks being marginalized in the company. She says:
I often [...]
The
Lean Enterprise Institute has recently published
Kaizen Express, an overview of the classic characteristics of “lean manufacturing” and, by implication, the Toyota Production System. As I set out to review the book, I found myself heading in two directions.
One is the content of the book itself.
Over the years, there have been a slew of [...]
A frequent topic in the
lean.org forums is some version of “what is the difference between lean and ____” where the blank is one of the industry buzzwords. Some of the common ones are various prefixes to “Sigma.” Others are old standards such as TQM, SPC, TOC, etc. These discussions are always interesting as the [...]
As we near the end of 2007, most of our respective organizations are looking at what we are going to do in 2008.
Part of that is usually to take a look at this year and look at where we are right now. There are a couple of ways to go about this, and I want [...]