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For 79 rounds, John Hunter of Curious Cat Blog and various guest hosts have issued the Management Improvement Carnival, a roundup of interesting blog posts for the month. I am proud to take responsibility for #80. Although I definitely leaned on some of my favorite bloggers, I also thought I

What happens when your team gets together to discuss strategy? Do you make clear decisions? Earlier this week there was a great post blog post on Entrepreneur.com by Tim Berry. Tim is one of my favorite bloggers about entrepreneurship and startups. This post was titled 5 Simple Obvious Truths About

Many people think the economy is improving. The data certainly suggest that this is true. But as often is the case, employment usually lags economic activity. I still get regular emails of people who recently lost their jobs that are thinking about entrepreneurship in this environment. Here’s a great dialogue

  How do you get started on the lean journey? Many organizations struggle with how to get started. They see this monumental journey ahead of them and there is so much to do, but where to start? I think a small and simple way to get started is just to

If you want to learn how to cook, who do you learn from? You could learn from the restaurant critic with their insight on what’s good and what’s not, or your could learn from a chef, who knows how and why to make the meal. I received a great question,

Over on the Lean Blog Mark Graban wrote a post titled Innovation Is as Innovation Does? Besides channeling Forrest Gump, this makes a great point. Innovation is an outcome, but without a process we won’t get it. And that process includes culture, skill, systems, methods, and so on. Mark makes

Direct observation has been an under-appreciated aspect of lean for most of its life. It has gotten a lot more attention in recent years, unfortunately, this is thanks in part to the use of jargon, such as gemba and genchi genbutsu. For those of you who know me, you know

How do you talk about time? Time is like money. We invest both time and money. We spend both time and money. We should (although most do neither) budget time and money. We waste both time and money. The only difference between them is that I can always get more

I have a new post published on StartUp Blog at PartnerUp. See the full article on that site. This is a guest post by Jamie Flinchbaugh. I’ve met a number of people who want to start businesses but have been clawing away at the same idea for many years without

I ran across this over the weekend. I was shocked, but also saw how simple this could make working with simple value stream maps on your computer. It’s a font you can download that contains value stream mapping symbols. You can download it for free from Ambor. I generally don’t