Blog

What blogs do you follow? With twitter folks sharing their favorite follows on Friday’s, I think the bloggers should be doing the same. I’ve found that I’m learning and reading more from bloggers these days than magazines and journals. So I thought I would share some of the bloggers I

This article was originally published by JFlinch on Oct 15, 2009. What tool should I use for solving this problem? What’s the right tool? There are many tools in the toolbox of lean for problem-solving and process improvement. When an organization teaches people to use the tools, there is often

Do you know what your supply chain really costs you? Most companies don’t. They do know how much they spend on suppliers, but that’s just the transaction costs. There are many other true costs in your organization that are affected by the design of your supply chain. The design affects

When does PDCA not apply? Can we say “not here”? Alan Shalloway attempted to address this for the software community in his blog last week. You can read his full post yourself. Apparently many in the software community (but not all, before you call me out on that) feel that

Many organizations have formal recognition methods within their organization that are used to highlight people and their accomplishments. Other organizations practice recognition more informally, in team meetings and even in hallways with simple “thank you for ____” statements. Neither of these are wrong, as long as you are practicing some

True lean thinkers in positions of power are hard to come by, but Paul O’Neill may be one of the best examples we have in the US. Former head of Alcoa, former Treasury Secretary under President Bush (for a very short period), and founder of the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative

If lean is about anything, it is about solving problems both large and small. Becoming a world class problem solving organization takes time. It requires learning new skills and developing the culture to truly invest in problem solving as a daily practice. But as you begin this journey, you can’t

In following the tradition of Twitter’s Friday Follows, where people share who they are following, I thought I would bring the same spirit of sharing to blogging (and encourage other bloggers to do the same). I’ll start with my all-time favorite lean blog, Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org. I’ve known Mark since

A book that is more obscure than it deserves is Taiichi Ohno’s Workplace Management. When most people think of this father of the Toyota Production System, they focus on Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System book. However, that book is more transcribed from Ohno’s thoughts. Workplace Management is more direct, and

Lessons from my trip around the world Every year I promise myself I won’t take 3 week business trips anymore, and every year I break my promise. My recent trip took me interesting places: Poland, Israel, Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia. Both Poland and Philippines were new to me. Whenever I