Industry Week

Lean equals process improvement, right? Wrong. Lean is about people. We improve processes because bad processes beat good people. Good processes enable people. Good processes improve our consistency. But will a great process deliver greatness? Probably not, because talent is still required. This column for IndustryWeek, titled Is Talent or

I continue to surprise myself with the number of important topics that I have yet to write about, despite how many years I have written both blog posts and columns for first Assembly Magazine and now for several years IndustryWeek. This month I take on the topic of standardization. The

It’s hard to sound more jargony (yes, I made up that word) than oobeya, but its functionality for improving communication and collaboration for teams is unparalleled. And so, after IndustryWeek’s Jill Jusko described it in Obeya: The Brain of the Lean Enterprise, that opened the door for me to cover

This year, for my Industry Week column, I’ve tried to take on topics that may have many people disagreeing with me. It is one way to move the conversation. This is a topic that isn’t controversial as much as it is political and messy: where in the organization should I

I was recently having a lot of conversations about the use of andon, how and why it works, and how to tailor the concept to a specific application. They asked if I had an article or column on the topic, and was quite surprised that I had never taken the

In 2016 I am trying, with my column Lessons from the Road, to stretch people’s thinking and not just refine it. I hope that most of my columns will generate some disagreement or at least some questions. This month in White space for important work I am addressing Leader Standard

I have been writing columns for 10 years now, first with a regular feature for Assembly Magazine titled Leading Lean, and for the last 5 years with IndustryWeek with Lessons from the Road, a title chosen from the sub-title of my book with Andy Carlino, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean.

I was flipping through the latest copy of IndustryWeek and came across this page. I wasn’t aware it was being run, but it’s nice to know that IW considers my columns useful enough to put them together in a guidebook. You can download the Lean Leadership Guidebook here.

From the conferences I’ve attended to the unsolicited emails I receive, I’ve been continually impressed by the quality of engagement throughout the lean community. There is plenty of interest in learning, sharing, and collaborating. I wrote my regular IndustryWeek column on how to engage with the lean community, as there

I’m not sure there is a topic where the ratio of organizational impact to effort and thought put into it can be higher. People throw together organizational designs based on a whim, with often very little thought as to the consequences. Yet it affects decision making, process, and so on.