Month: May 2011

Waste elimination seems pretty straightforward, right? Of course waste elimination is good, so why do we need a purpose? Because when we free up waste, most organizations don’t know what to do with it. To be clear about this, you first need to be clear about the strategic direction or

I have a new post published on The Lean Edge. See the full article on that site. The question asked was “what counts as ‘lean success’?” Albert Einstein once said: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. I see most people making

I’m always perplexed and frustrated by the annual budgeting process. The waste I see it creating, even from outside organizations, is incredibly large. People start planning things financially before they have any idea of what to do. People postpone things that they shouldn’t because it’s not yet in the budget,

Guest Post: Kurt Woolley is Lean Champion within Intel’s Fab/Sort Manufacturing (FSM) organization, and founder of Atmos Industries. See more on his LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kurt-woolley/3/941/575. Do lean methods apply within a subcontractor-based business? Oh yes! In my recent journeys, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a sub-contractor business –

A new blog post on the Blogging Innovation website, There’s Always Another New Approach… Last year I saw a comment from a respected entrepreneur who was claiming “all the big ideas have already been created.” I was highly disappointed, because it’s reeks of pre-1492 attitudes about the Earth. You can’t

My 2nd installment of Lessons from the Road, my new column for Industry Week is now available. This month the topic is Sustaining Your 5S Efforts. One of my early columns for Assembly Magazine titled Planning 5S? First Know Why! 5 years later, it’s still one of the most popular

A great but simple poem… Soup by Carl Sandburg I saw a famous man eating soup. I say he was lifting a fat broth Into his mouth with a spoon. His name was in the newspapers that day Spelled out in tall black headlines And thousands of people were talking

First off, yes, I know Mother’s Day was a week ago. I didn’t miss it. What is Mother’s Day? It’s the celebration of something: 1. … completely vital, critical, essential, and, 2. … mostly taken for granted. We do that a lot in our organizations. It’s not a problem to

How do you spread good ideas across your organization? My fellow blogger Jon Miller wrote a great post on Yokoten, or lateral deployment, a couple months ago. It’s a great post, both because of it’s content but also because of it’s importance. How much is an idea worth to your

Our friend in the lean community, Liz Guthridge of Connect Consulting Group, recently wrote a blog post titled Reinforce, yes; repeat, no. It caught my attention because I am a big advocate of repetition in communication. At first, it appeared that we were advocating the exact opposite approach. Repeating communication