Lean Whiskey Episode #14
Coronavirus, Supply Chains, and JIT
In Episode 14 of Lean Whiskey, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh finish off another weekend by catching up, drinking whiskey, and talking shop. In whiskey, we explore the idea of adding water to your whiskey. Rather than take the tradition as fact, the lean thinker must seek an understanding of cause and effect. We find some of the research, and perform our experiments to validate that it actually works. 
We move on to a less fun topic, coronavirus or COVID-19, and its impact on your supply chain. We avoid any exploration in the medical advice category, but focus on a key question that comes up any time there is a massive supply chain impact: does lean’s just-in-time strip out too much inventory? In addition to exploring this question, we expand on it by examining how companies deal with the less predictable risks such as this health crisis.
We move on to explore a nearly timeless question: “We’ve led a grassroots lean initiative at my company for the past couple of years. It has been successful, but we are struggling to take it to the next level and get buy-in from upper management. Upper management is slow to change and set in their ways. Any advice on how to ‘sell’ this internally?” Mark and Jamie break this problem down for how you can examine it in your organization.
We finish by talking about our different approaches to presentations, with Mark reducing word count and using pictures to tell the story, and Jamie dropping slides altogether. We equally agree, however, that you must know your stuff if you’re going to get in front of an audience.
- Why adding water to whiskey matters in Forbes
- NPR’s take on adding water to whiskey
- Angels’ Share water dropper we both used
- Mark’s first selection, Garrison Brothers Cowboy Bourbon
- Mark’s second selection, Longrow Cabernet Cask 11 Years Peated Campeltown Single Malt Scotch
- Jamie’s selection, Glenfarclas 21 year old
- Marketplace’s article about just-in-time and the effect of coronavirus
- NACD’s guide to boards of directors about dealing with coronavirus
- More from the economic impact from New York Times
- Podcast feed at LeanWhiskey.com or at leanblog.org/leanwhiskey or at jflinch.com/leanwhiskey
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