From the category archives:

General

Are you working on the right problems?

05.17.2012

Lean is not all about waste, despite what we see in most definitions and applications. If it were about one thing (which oversimplifies things) it would be about problem solving, at all levels of the organization. We take problem solving for granted. Why? Because we’ve been doing it since we were very young. We learned [...]

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Building a Problem Solving Organization Presentation

05.15.2012

I want to thank Enterprise Minnesota and the Center for Business & Industry for hosting me during the Lean Enterprise Summit held today. The following are my slides from my talk on building a problem solving organization.    

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To hell with your competitors, compete against perfection

05.10.2012

This is a quote from the book Lean Thinking by Jim Womack and Daniel Jones, and I think one of the most useful phrases brought out from this book. What does it mean? So many companies spend considerable amount of time focusing on their competitors: what are they doing? What’s their next product? What’s their [...]

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Experiment Your Way to Success

04.24.2012

My latest column for Industry Week, Lessons from the Road, titled Experiment Your Way to Success has been posted. Here is an excerpt:   The heart of most effective continuous improvement is experimentation. Experimentation is the mother of all learning methods. It drives learning throughout an organization based on what is real, not based on [...]

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New blog activity at the Lean Learning Center

04.15.2012

As I’m sure you know by now, I’m  co-founder of the Lean Learning Center. Since December of last year, our team started to share their ideas through blog posts in the Center’s website. I’ve also contributed some articles and here are some of what we have: Don’t let accounting be your excuse – 04.05.12 How [...]

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Don’t just change the process if people aren’t following the existing one

04.01.2012

Process improvement is process improvement, right? Many people who get immersed in process improvement practices have such a focus on improving the process, that we don’t know when to pull up on the reigns and consider whether it’s the right approach. For example, I’ve noticed several situations lately at clients that I’m coaching of people [...]

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Chrysler’s boss abandons the top-floor

03.27.2012

Where are your executive offices? And how do they affect the engagement of the organization? In the early 1990s, Chrysler built the Chrysler Technology Center. The design was intended to help communication. Each floor was dedicated to a different platform: minivan, large car, small car. Vertically, their functional focus on design, such as body or [...]

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Experimenting outside the bounds of experience […more thoughts from The Talent Code]

03.20.2012

Experimentation is at the core of lean improvement. It is what PDCA: Plan Do Check Act is all about. It’s what drives learning, and knowledge development. But what happens when you’re experimenting outside the boundaries of known experience and knowledge. We build knowledge and experience from our own experiments, but that knowledge is less useful [...]

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Learning through frequent (but safe) failure [thoughts from The Talent Code]

03.15.2012

“Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress quickly.” – Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and creator of Moore’s Law If we learn more from failure than success, how do we do it in a controlled way and minimize the [...]

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Don’t over-invest in high-level process design

03.13.2012

Should you design your process at the 30,000 foot level before the 5 foot level? What level should you focus on? If you only have 3 days to invest in process improvement, do you pick a major process and design at a high level or pick one element and dive into the details? These are [...]

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