Industry Week

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.

In this installment of my IndustryWeek Lessons from the Road column, I address some of the needs and challenges of Training Within Industry, after reflections from my keynote at Lean Frontier’s TWI / Lean HR Summit. In The Need for Training Within Industry, I don’t so much cover the basics

Through my IndustryWeek column, Lessons from the Road, I’ve been exploring some of the issues associated with the ongoing maturing of a lean journey. In this installment, Beyond the Lean Initiative, I explore issues with making lean an integral part of the organization. It can no longer be an initiative.

Do you feel a little out of control of your lean journey? Good. The lean journey is not one that can be so self-contained that one person or team can keep their arms around it. If they can, it either hasn’t reached that important transitional point, or you are choking

Organizational transformation is a tricky challenge. Many, if not most, of the questions I received have to do with how to transform an organization. And a small organization is just as challenging as a large organization, but for different reasons. In the last installment of Lessons from the Road, I

It’s time for another installment of Lessons from the Road, my column for IndustryWeek. In the next few installments, I will talk about the lean roadmap, or how to handle the change management of the lean journey. This month, I am talking about the beginning of the journey, The Lean

I’ve written about observation many times before, but in my latest IndustryWeek Lessons from the Road column, I address how to use the different levels of observation and make better decisions about observation. Here is an excerpt from Using Observation Systematically: There are four distinct levels of observation, each with

My last two Lessons from the Road columns [Building Behaviors Bedrock of Lean Success and Build a Deliberate Culture, Not an Accidental One] focused on the tactics and strategies of culture change, which is crucial for a successful lean journey. One of those tactics is to role model the right

For my latest column, I set out to write about culture change. I barely got through the introduction and realized I’m already out of room. Such is the restriction of a 1-page column. So, the introduction became the column. You can read the latest installment of Lessons from the Road,