Published Articles

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

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.

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.

From the conferences I’ve attended to the unsolicited emails I receive, I’ve been continually impressed by the quality of engagement throughout the lean community. There is plenty of interest in learning, sharing, and collaborating. I wrote my regular IndustryWeek column on how to engage with the lean community, as there

I’m not sure there is a topic where the ratio of organizational impact to effort and thought put into it can be higher. People throw together organizational designs based on a whim, with often very little thought as to the consequences. Yet it affects decision making, process, and so on.

I’ve been writing the Lessons from the Road column for IndustryWeek for many years now, and Leading Lean for Assembly Magazine for many years before that. You’d think I’d run out of topics. But each column continues to challenge me to think a bit more deeply and more clearly about

In this installment of my IndustryWeek Lessons from the Road column, I address some of the needs and challenges of Training Within Industry, after reflections from my keynote at Lean Frontier’s TWI / Lean HR Summit. In The Need for Training Within Industry, I don’t so much cover the basics

Through my IndustryWeek column, Lessons from the Road, I’ve been exploring some of the issues associated with the ongoing maturing of a lean journey. In this installment, Beyond the Lean Initiative, I explore issues with making lean an integral part of the organization. It can no longer be an initiative.

Do you feel a little out of control of your lean journey? Good. The lean journey is not one that can be so self-contained that one person or team can keep their arms around it. If they can, it either hasn’t reached that important transitional point, or you are choking

Organizational transformation is a tricky challenge. Many, if not most, of the questions I received have to do with how to transform an organization. And a small organization is just as challenging as a large organization, but for different reasons. In the last installment of Lessons from the Road, I