Flinchbaugh

Noses In, Fingers Out is a long-standard rule of thumb for boards of directors and the organizations they govern. What does it mean? Well, that’s not so clear especially as the world has gotten more complicated. Fundamentally it means that board members should have their noses in the business. They

Last week I was visiting a very large operation in Costa Rica. As the strategy was being discussed, I noticed that we were going to review 5S efforts later in my visit. I started questioning this line of thought, because they had so many things going on in their organization

Today I am giving a speech at the Printing Industries of America conference in Tampa, Florida. The topic is Developing People Using A3 Thinking. I have written a lot about the A3 process before and you can find some of my posts here. Here is the presentation I will be

Today I am presenting at the American Machine Tool Distributors’ Association annual meeting. Some of you know that I have some roots in this industry as my father ran Weldon Machine Tool. Below in Slideshare you can see a modified version of my presentation. AMTDA for slideshare View more presentations

Every day is an adventure. We approach our work with clients with an extreme bias towards flexibility. We do have standard work for activities, but how we might engage a client will be different every time. And that starts with a wide range of requests. But some of them we

Does your company pay as much attention to wasted time as wasted money? I doubt it. Sure, we can throw around the phrase “time is money” but usually in an attempt to tell someone that they’re wasting our time. We have financial reports, ROI, annualized savings, and mechanism after mechanism

No organization can become lean just from running lean projects and events. One organization did over 14,000 lean projects and still failed as a company, because they relied entirely on those events. Some of the problems include: If the methods, tools, and behaviors are not consistent with lean, project results

Eric Ries, author of the StartupLessonsLearned.com blog, has been speaking and writing about lean startups. His particular focus is on software startups, and perhaps even more focused on those that are web-based and broadly distributed products. However, his thoughts on how to use lean principles such as experimentation, structure, and

A useful fable from Aesop, one of my all-time favorite writers, The Mice in Council. Long ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse

..although note I did not say “as easy as 1, 2, 3.” Diagnosing our current reality of any situation is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks for a lean thinker. It’s harder for a lean thinker than for a non-lean thinker. Why? Because a non-lean thinker is quite comfortable