2020

While I try to practice a lens for waste in all of my work and passionately eliminate what I can, I haven’t done an actual waste walk on my work in a while. So I thought I would do a waste walk on the part of my work that has

There is no universally best way to organize those resources who identify as lean or continuous improvement people. Should you have them centrally located in one team? Should you embed them throughout the company in a decentralized way? Should you do a hybrid of both? What matters in making this

The world has changed, how should lean change with it? If you’re a lean professional or lean practitioner, how are you adding value now? How has it affected your lean work? Hear a few of my thoughts on how we must change.  

In Episode 17, after not doing an episode of Lean Whiskey in almost two months, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh try all sorts of firsts. We had three people, with Jim Huntzinger of Lean Frontiers joining us. We all drank the same whiskey. We used two different whiskeys. We talked

Many things are broken today – hospitals, businesses, processes, sales channels, collaborations, and even people. While I actually believe more things will return to normal that is often reported (albeit taking a couple / few years).  I think “return to normal” misses the point. When something is broken, there is

I recently read the book The Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell. Besides the fact that he was a coach to Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and others of such stature (hence the title), I loved that (a) he connected his sports coaching with his business

Chances are that your organization has some form of a Lean team, but those resources come in all sorts of different forms. In the next several videos, we will explore how to Organize Your Lean Team, starting with this video where we explore the role of lean resources. What should

I am pleased to announce a new collaboration between JFlinch and IndustryWeek titled Factory Talk : Secrets of Effective Plant Leaders. Many of you have been readers of my long-time column, Lessons from the Road, which we retired last year. In this new project, we will be interviewing factory leaders,

In reading Russell Ackoff’s A Lifetime of Systems Thinking, he shared a key point about mental content that I think relates to lean systems in a way that reveals a weakness in many lean practices.  Ackoff starts by exploring the hierarchy of mental content, which he orders as: data, information,

There are so many leadership capabilities that we could tie to effective problem solving, why should we focus on coaching? What makes coaching so important? I believe this comparison will make it clear (and here’s a hint: it’s all about your purpose).  When I’m coaching a soccer game, many instances