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Organizational design can be used to solve problems or enhance lean methods. I wrote on the relationship that HR can play with lean, and fitting in with organizational design, in Organizational Design and Role of HR in Lean. Certainly mental models are challenged within a lean journey and the organizational

Noses In, Fingers Out is a long-standard rule of thumb for boards of directors and the organizations they govern. What does it mean? Well, that’s not so clear especially as the world has gotten more complicated. Fundamentally it means that board members should have their noses in the business. They

Last week I was visiting a very large operation in Costa Rica. As the strategy was being discussed, I noticed that we were going to review 5S efforts later in my visit. I started questioning this line of thought, because they had so many things going on in their organization

Today I am giving a speech at the Printing Industries of America conference in Tampa, Florida. The topic is Developing People Using A3 Thinking. I have written a lot about the A3 process before and you can find some of my posts here. Here is the presentation I will be

Today I am presenting at the American Machine Tool Distributors’ Association annual meeting. Some of you know that I have some roots in this industry as my father ran Weldon Machine Tool. Below in Slideshare you can see a modified version of my presentation. AMTDA for slideshare View more presentations

“Sponsor our program and reach 100s of prospective clients” – I hear it all the time. We get calls and emails and mailers to sponsor conferences, programs, special reports, and so on. But we always think in terms of value. I can’t understand what value sponsoring the continental breakfast really

Every day is an adventure. We approach our work with clients with an extreme bias towards flexibility. We do have standard work for activities, but how we might engage a client will be different every time. And that starts with a wide range of requests. But some of them we

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