Posts tagged as:

learning organization

Ford shows a new reflective side, but how far will they take it?

05.08.2013

Ford has come an incredibly long way in time since Bill Ford Jr. courageously stepped aside to bring in lean thinker Alan Mulally. Lately, they’ve been hampered by the embarrassing problems in relaunching the Lincoln brand through the MKZ. But, in the face of these problems, they are doing their best to reflect and make [...]

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →

Embracing the scientific method

01.03.2013

This post originally appeared on the blog at Lean Learning Center.  I read plenty of disturbing statements about lean, but I read one recently that really caught my attention because it seemed to rip the core of lean out of lean, and then almost claim credit for putting it back in. I was reading a [...]

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →

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 [...]

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →

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.    

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →

Don’t Limit Your Sources of Learning

02.11.2011

Everyone wants to copy the best. That’s why companies such as Toyota and General Electric have been popular sources of benchmarking. That’s why Chrysler was so highly benchmarked when we were the most profitable car company. In the lean community, I have observed a common practice of filtering ideas based on whether they come from [...]

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →

Slow and Steady, and Routine

01.24.2011

You haven’t gotten any sleep all week, so you try to get one night of 12 hours to make up for it all. It doesn’t work very well, does it? You haven’t worked out in a month, so you spend all day in the gym to make up for it. It doesn’t work, does it? [...]

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →

3 Ways to Train on a Budget

01.11.2011

I hope you have plans to develop your people in 2011. And I hope they are actionable plans. I have yet to meet a company that over-trains or over-develops its people. I meeting plenty of companies that believe that they can’t afford it. To which I say: Baloney! Hogwash! Nonsense! There is always a way [...]

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →

You CAN teach an old dog new tricks

10.11.2010

No matter what we do for a living, at some point we are all in the business of learning. Either we are on a learning curve ourselves. Or we are trying to influence others, whether through sales and marketing, or though managing, or through coaching. In any of these cases, it is beneficial to learn [...]

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →

When to coach the process, and when to coach the solution

09.09.2010

Do you think of yourself as a coach? When I ask this question, almost every single hand goes up. But what does that really mean? Do we have a process? Or do we confuse sharing our little bits of wisdom with coaching? To be an effective coach, you must combine process with intention. Today I [...]

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →

Grouting your life with learning

08.04.2010

Another little gem from the internet is about learning. A lean thinker is all about learning. We recommend small steps, any step, every day. Sometimes you have to squeeze it in the cracks. That’s where grouting comes in. Grout fills in the cracks. How do you fill in the little spaces of time in your [...]

TwitterLinkedInDeliciousStumbleUponGoogle BookmarksShare
Read the full article →