Published Articles

Is Talent or Process Vital to Lean Success? It’s Not Really a Choice [Lessons from the Road]

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 04-11-17

Lean equals process improvement, right? Wrong. Lean is about people. We improve processes because bad processes beat good people. Good processes enable people. Good processes improve our consistency. But will a great process deliver greatness? Probably not, because talent is still required. This column for IndustryWeek, titled Is Talent or

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Do the work, improve the work

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 03-20-17

Sometimes, performance doesn’t come from big, bold, broad interventions. Sometimes, performance is just about improving our work design. This article from MIT Alumni Magazine highlights the work of Professor Nelson Repenning. Dr. Repenning was just beginning his faculty career when I was a student at MIT, and I’ve followed his

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Standardization is not for its own sake [Lessons from the Road]

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 01-30-17

I continue to surprise myself with the number of important topics that I have yet to write about, despite how many years I have written both blog posts and columns for first Assembly Magazine and now for several years IndustryWeek. This month I take on the topic of standardization. The

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Lessons from the Road: Making Oobeya Work

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 12-07-16

It’s hard to sound more jargony (yes, I made up that word) than oobeya, but its functionality for improving communication and collaboration for teams is unparalleled. And so, after IndustryWeek’s Jill Jusko described it in Obeya: The Brain of the Lean Enterprise, that opened the door for me to cover

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Where’s your lean team? [Lessons from the Road]

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 10-05-16

This year, for my Industry Week column, I’ve tried to take on topics that may have many people disagreeing with me. It is one way to move the conversation. This is a topic that isn’t controversial as much as it is political and messy: where in the organization should I

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The misunderstanding of andon [Lessons from the Road]

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 07-06-16

I was recently having a lot of conversations about the use of andon, how and why it works, and how to tailor the concept to a specific application. They asked if I had an article or column on the topic, and was quite surprised that I had never taken the

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Sometimes you must follow [Lessons from the Road]

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 05-11-16

Before my Lessons from the Road column for IndustryWeek, I wrote one called Leading Lean for Assembly Magazine. Books are written about leading, a chapter in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean is about leading, but no one writes about following. Do we only follow because the leader is just that

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White space for important work [Lessons from the Road]

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 02-29-16

In 2016 I am trying, with my column Lessons from the Road, to stretch people’s thinking and not just refine it. I hope that most of my columns will generate some disagreement or at least some questions. This month in White space for important work I am addressing Leader Standard

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Make Your Process Fragile [Lessons from the Road]

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 02-01-16

I have been writing columns for 10 years now, first with a regular feature for Assembly Magazine titled Leading Lean, and for the last 5 years with IndustryWeek with Lessons from the Road, a title chosen from the sub-title of my book with Andy Carlino, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean.

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IndustryWeek’s Lean Leadership Guidebook

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 12-20-15

I was flipping through the latest copy of IndustryWeek and came across this page. I wasn’t aware it was being run, but it’s nice to know that IW considers my columns useful enough to put them together in a guidebook. You can download the Lean Leadership Guidebook here.

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