Flinchbaugh

Lost money can be re-earned. Lost time can be clawed back. Lost love reignited. Lost integrity is unrecoverable. I posted this phrase on Twitter and Facebook recently. I took some “feedback” for it. Some argued that time lost was lost. Truly, it is. But if I needed x hours to

I recently gave a short interview on lean finance. It was more of an introductory conversation that spontaneously turned into an interview. It was a handful of questions. You can see the interview with Business Finance here.

  I have used Aesop’s Fables before, and here are some lessons from The Bee and Jupiter. A Queen bee from Hymettus flew up to Olympus with some fresh honey from the hive as a present to Jupiter, who was pleased with the gift that he promised to give her

This is my last column of Leading Lean for Assembly Magazine. After 5 years and 55 columns, it is time to move on. The column can be found here. I will soon be starting a new column very soon for Industry Week magazine. The title will be Lessons from the

  You haven’t gotten any sleep all week, so you try to get one night of 12 hours to make up for it all. It doesn’t work very well, does it? You haven’t worked out in a month, so you spend all day in the gym to make up for

  Have you ever heard a leader say, out loud, “I lead through fear, intimidation, and public humiliation”? I doubt it. Have you ever seen a leader try to lead in this way? I would guess you probably have. I think most of the people who are leading through such

  I hope you have plans to develop your people in 2011. And I hope they are actionable plans. I have yet to meet a company that over-trains or over-develops its people. I meeting plenty of companies that believe that they can’t afford it. To which I say: Baloney! Hogwash!

Yes, I am an engineer by training, and sometimes look to principles of engineering systems for lessons in organizational improvement. One of my favorite classes, believe it or not, was thermodynamics. I found to be an innate beauty and how thermodynamic systems worked. The second law of thermodynamics states that

Waste elimination has often been a central tenant in lean transformation. However, leave is not all about waste, as I wrote about on The Lean Edge recently. if you are going to focus on waste, then certainly the go almost be the reduction, and ultimately, the elimination of the waste

In my coaching, many of my conversations begin with a source of frustration by the individual. The source of frustration could be rooted in another person, or a team problem, or in their own abilities. But nonetheless, the frustration is there. This is a good thing. The philosophy that I’ve