Month: January 2011

Tonight I presented my partner at the Lean Learning Center, Andy Carlino, with the following gift. This year marks some milestones. One is that the Lean Learning Center has been open for 10 years. The other, just as significant, is that we mark 20 years of consulting for Andy. He’s

  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

  Have you ever heard a leader say, out loud, “I lead through fear, intimidation, and public humiliation”? I doubt it. Have you ever seen a leader try to lead in this way? I would guess you probably have. I think most of the people who are leading through such

I have a new post published on Blogging Innovation. See the full article on that site. by Jamie Flinchbaugh Creativity remains one of the most nebulous and elusive capabilities for organizational performance. Yet there is more knowledge and science available today than ever to help us through the challenge. Creativity

This may be my favorite story about waste elimination…   As part of his company’s policy, Bill had to manually fill out his timecard each week.  On that time card was a column titled ARS.  When Bill started, he was taught to just put a zero in the ARS column

There are many examples set by Martin Luther King Jr. than any one of us could follow and be a better person. I’m not at all qualified to write in depth about this leader. But there are many words of leadership that I think describe the example he has set.

Tonight I’ll be doing a webinar for the ongoing monthly The Human Side of Lean Conference Call, supported by SME and hosted by Juergen Boenisch. The topic is: Changing Behaviors through Daily Actions Behavior as secret weapon for continuous improvement Here’s the time: Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011 @ 7pm ET

  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!

by Jamie Flinchbaugh In my coaching, many of my conversations begin with a source of frustration by the individual. The source of frustration could be rooted in another person, or a team problem, or in their own abilities. But nonetheless, the frustration is there. This is a good thing. The

Yes, I am an engineer by training, and sometimes look to principles of engineering systems for lessons in organizational improvement. One of my favorite classes, believe it or not, was thermodynamics. I found to be an innate beauty and how thermodynamic systems worked. The second law of thermodynamics states that