general

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

Many of us have spent a little time cleaning out our home offices, ensuring it’s ready for maximum focus while working from home. I’ve technically worked from home for 20 years, but given my travel, it was only a couple days a month most of the time. And while cleaning

I’ve always considered Russell Ackoff one of the most persistent and insightful systems thinkers. While sometimes his ideas are elusive for organizations to grab ahold of (I don’t always agree with his conclusions), he expects better from organizations, and I think those ideas are worth delving into. As I prepare

In Episode 16, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh take a little longer than usual to get to the lean talk. Our whiskey topic was cocktails, which takes longer to make (and apparently talk about) than pouring neat whiskey into a tumbler. Mark made a Boulevardier and Jamie made an Old