Published Articles

My latest column for Industry Week, Lessons from the Road, titled Experiment Your Way to Success has been posted. Here is an excerpt:   The heart of most effective continuous improvement is experimentation. Experimentation is the mother of all learning methods. It drives learning throughout an organization based on what

My latest column for IndustryWeek, Lessons from the Road, titled Securing the Elusive Lean Buy-In has been posted. Here is an excerpt:   You have passion about making lean work in your organization. You have ideas, and you are ready to realize them. You have experience and are willing to

IndustryWeek, the magazine for whom I now right a bi-monthly columned titled Lessons from the Road, just released the 2011 class of the Manufacturing Hall of Fame. Our co-founder of the Lean Learning Center, Dennis Pawley, was named in the Class of 2010. I won’t spoil the whole list, which

My latest column for Industry Week, Lessons from the Road, titled “Building Manager Standard Work” has been posted. Here is an excerpt:   …People resist building standards in knowledge work because of natural variation. Yet if you already have variation, why would you want to add more by having no

My latest column for Industry Week, Lessons from the Road, titled Going to the Gemba has been posted. Here is an excerpt: Going to the gemba has become popular for the simple reason that it is powerfully effective. But there is more to it than getting up from your desk, as

This post is part of my column for Industry Week called Lessons from the Road and is now available. “Just because we don’t have training dollars to invest does not mean that we can’t develop our people. People development requires momentum; if we aren’t moving forward, we’re falling behind. There

I occasionally post on The Lean Edge, which is a post where several lean authors will contribute inputs to the “question of the moment.” The question of the moment right now is: What are the most difficult industries and activities to introduce lean to and why? There many answers. Some

I have a new post published on The Lean Edge. See the full article on that site. The question asked was “what counts as ‘lean success’?” Albert Einstein once said: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. I see most people making

My 2nd installment of Lessons from the Road, my new column for Industry Week is now available. This month the topic is Sustaining Your 5S Efforts. One of my early columns for Assembly Magazine titled Planning 5S? First Know Why! 5 years later, it’s still one of the most popular

This month I am starting a new column for Industry Week. The title of the column is Lessons from the Road. Lessons from the Road is the subtitle of our book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean. In this new column, I hope to provide pragmatic and actionable advice for companies