books

Earlier today Mark Graban posted on the frequent highlights from Lean Hospitals. I am an avid Kindle user. I’ve loved as I’m reading (right now The House of Morgan ) the ability to see what other people have been highlighting. I never realized you could see the popular highlights accumulated

  Everyone wants to copy the best. That’s why companies such as Toyota and General Electric have been popular sources of benchmarking. That’s why Chrysler was so highly benchmarked when we were the most profitable car company. In the lean community, I have observed a common practice of filtering ideas

For those of you who have taken our Lean Experience, you know we have a very structured multi-step process to kick things off in which approximately 40 people read books, distill them to key points, share them with other, build common themes and ideas and prepare a presentation. A part

Kiyoshi Suzaki, a lean thinker who deserves to be at the top of any lean guru list, wrote: Lean tools are common sense – after the fact. I think that makes sense based on my observations. People see it, and they want to call lean “common sense”. Some organizations and

If you follow me on Twitter then you know about Follow Friday, where people share who they are following. Since I look at everything through the lens of value, I always struggle to see people just pumping out lists of names. That’s why I only post, and only read the

One of the most important principles in lean is respect for people. It is often glossed over as a nicety, given less rigor than things like just-in-time, and often misunderstood as abdication and softness. But respect for people is about leveraging the full talents of an individual and providing individuals

What’s the least expensive way to education people in your organization? Get them reading. There are now x,000 number of lean books available – I don’t actually know the number, but it’s a lot. At the Lean Learning Center, we buy everything we find for our book shelves as these

A book that is more obscure than it deserves is Taiichi Ohno’s Workplace Management. When most people think of this father of the Toyota Production System, they focus on Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System book. However, that book is more transcribed from Ohno’s thoughts. Workplace Management is more direct, and