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Does your company pay as much attention to wasted time as wasted money? I doubt it. Sure, we can throw around the phrase “time is money” but usually in an attempt to tell someone that they’re wasting our time. We have financial reports, ROI, annualized savings, and mechanism after mechanism

I have a new post published on Assembly Magazine. See the full article on that site. Manufacturers have no trouble hanging onto key employees these days, since job opportunities are scarce. But, that hasn’t reduced the need to find new ways to engage people. No matter what type of economic

No organization can become lean just from running lean projects and events. One organization did over 14,000 lean projects and still failed as a company, because they relied entirely on those events. Some of the problems include: If the methods, tools, and behaviors are not consistent with lean, project results

Eric Ries, author of the StartupLessonsLearned.com blog, has been speaking and writing about lean startups. His particular focus is on software startups, and perhaps even more focused on those that are web-based and broadly distributed products. However, his thoughts on how to use lean principles such as experimentation, structure, and

A useful fable from Aesop, one of my all-time favorite writers, The Mice in Council. Long ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse

..although note I did not say “as easy as 1, 2, 3.” Diagnosing our current reality of any situation is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks for a lean thinker. It’s harder for a lean thinker than for a non-lean thinker. Why? Because a non-lean thinker is quite comfortable

Although I have written about Undercover Boss, don’t expect this post to be about Donald Trump’s Apprentice (even if the show has now officially jumped the shark, since we now have crook governors and ex-wrestlers). But while fun to say “You’re Fired!” on TV, it’s a lot harder in real

Are you heading to a conference soon? We’re coming up on conference season for many organizations. I observe most people not getting their full value out of the process. I will share why at the end of this post. I have my own schedule. In April alone, I will be

Yesterday I was working with a team who was working on a very long-term kind of change. They were really stuck, spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to achieve the end state. That is a mistake. Abraham Lincoln said: “The best thing about the future is

This is the final part of a 4 part series on Creating Employee Engagement. You can first read Parts 1, 2, and 3. Skills Required for Engagement Skill gaps to create engagement exist both in employees and managers, although most transformation efforts tend to focus on only one or the