How Smart Leaders Talk About Time
How do you talk about time? Time is like money. We invest both time and money. We spend both time and money. We should (although most do neither) budget time and money. We waste both time and money. The only difference between them is that I can always get more
Read MoreValue Stream Mapping Font
I ran across this over the weekend. I was shocked, but also saw how simple this could make working with simple value stream maps on your computer. It’s a font you can download that contains value stream mapping symbols. You can download it for free from Ambor. I generally don’t
Read MoreBlog Action Day on Climate Change
Yesterday was apparently Blog Action Day ’09 on Climate Change. At my last check, 13,163 blogs are writing about climate change today. With that in mind, I partly want to just leave it at that because there is probably a lot said in 1,000s of blogs already. But I’ll add
Read MoreFriday Follows for Lean Blogs
What blogs do you follow? With twitter folks sharing their favorite follows on Friday’s, I think the bloggers should be doing the same. I’ve found that I’m learning and reading more from bloggers these days than magazines and journals. So I thought I would share some of the bloggers I
Read MorePut Down That Tool
This article was originally published by JFlinch on Oct 15, 2009. What tool should I use for solving this problem? What’s the right tool? There are many tools in the toolbox of lean for problem-solving and process improvement. When an organization teaches people to use the tools, there is often
Read MoreUnderstanding Total Cost
Do you know what your supply chain really costs you? Most companies don’t. They do know how much they spend on suppliers, but that’s just the transaction costs. There are many other true costs in your organization that are affected by the design of your supply chain. The design affects
Read MorePDCA in Non-Deterministic Systems
When does PDCA not apply? Can we say “not here”? Alan Shalloway attempted to address this for the software community in his blog last week. You can read his full post yourself. Apparently many in the software community (but not all, before you call me out on that) feel that
Read MoreRecognize For the Future, Not the Past
Many organizations have formal recognition methods within their organization that are used to highlight people and their accomplishments. Other organizations practice recognition more informally, in team meetings and even in hallways with simple “thank you for ____” statements. Neither of these are wrong, as long as you are practicing some
Read MoreLeading Lean A-Z: F for be First
by Jamie Flinchbaugh, co-author, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean[This is a continuation of a thread on Leading Lean topics from A-Z]When visiting companies that feel better about their lean journey than they probably should, perhaps the most common thin…
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