From the monthly archives:

October 2009

Friday Follows for Lean Blogs

10.16.2009

What blogs do you follow? With twitter folks sharing their favorite follows on Friday’s, I think the bloggers should be doing the same. I’ve found that I’m learning and reading more from bloggers these days than magazines and journals. So I thought I would share some of the bloggers I follow. I started with Mark [...]

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Put Down That Tool

10.15.2009

What tool should I use for solving this problem? What’s the right tool? There are many tools in the toolbox of lean for problem solving and process improvement. When an organization teaches people to use the tools, there is often an over-reliance on jumping into using the tool without making sure it’s the right tool. [...]

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Understanding Total Cost

10.14.2009

Do you know what your supply chain really costs you? Most companies don’t. They do know how much they spend on suppliers, but that’s just the transaction costs. There are many other true costs in your organization that are affected by the design of your supply chain. The design affects communication costs, alignment in decision [...]

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PDCA in Non-Deterministic Systems

10.13.2009

When does PDCA not apply? Can we say “not here”? Alan Shalloway attempted to address this for the software community in his blog last week. You can read his full post yourself. Apparently many in the software community (but not all, before you call me out on that) feel that PDCA can’t work because your [...]

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Working on the VERY BIG Problem

10.12.2009

Do you have a starting point for your strategic plans? A very short post today, but I wanted to capture some thoughts on a meeting I was in this weekend. It was the presentation of a long-term plan. When it came to the rationale for the strategic plan, it started with “what are the really [...]

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Lean Learning Center on the web

10.08.2009

I won’t use this blog to do very much promotional activities, but I thought I would take a moment to share some of what the Lean Learning Center has to offer around the web. First, there is our website. Of course on website there is information of our courses, services, and products, but I won’t [...]

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No Rx for Lean

10.07.2009

I have a new post published on Jamie Flinchbaugh on LeanBlog. See the full article on that site. by Jamie Flinchbaugh, Lean Learning Center I recently have had the opportunity to review a wide range of sites and companies and provide feedback on their lean journey. One of the things that really surprised me was [...]

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Recognize For the Future, Not the Past

10.06.2009

Many organizations have formal recognition methods within their organization that are used to highlight people and their accomplishments. Other organizations practice recognition more informally, in team meetings and even in hallways with simple “thank you for ____” statements. Neither of these are wrong, as long as you are practicing some methods for recognition in your [...]

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Leading Lean: Turning Thinking Into Action

10.01.2009

I have a new post published on Assembly Magazine. See the full article on that site. An action plan is one of the most important parts of an A3 report. Turning ideas and conversations into crisp, focused action plans is something every lean leader needs to do.  

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Lean thinker Paul O’Neill

10.01.2009

True lean thinkers in positions of power are hard to come by, but Paul O’Neill may be one of the best examples we have in the US. Former head of Alcoa, former Treasury Secretary under President Bush (for a very short period), and founder of the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative to help bring lean to [...]

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