respect for people

When people talk about a lean journey, they say the word “journey” as if they understand it will take time to change a culture, however their behavior often reveals they don’t have the relentless patience will actually take to create change.  We talked about the effort required to changing a

Learning what works and what doesn’t work is driven by experimentation, real-world trials that inform us about cause and effect. How do we improve the ability to experiment? By reducing the cost, the effort, the friction required to test what works. As we continue my effort to de-jargonize (ok, that’s

In the flow of a manufacturing plant, the bottleneck should often be the most valuable, or at least most expensive asset. We actually should be designing our processes around that fact, and then ensuring there is no unnecessary waste in the process that affects that bottleneck. In the Theory of

The idea that just as doctors practice medicine we must practice lean is the premise of a book I contributed to called Practicing Lean which was edited by Mark Graban. We must be wiling to evolve our practices and learn as we move forward.   Order a copy of the book today

The principle of Respect for People has received greater attention in the lean community over the past several years. Books, blogs, and speeches have all given attention to its importance. Both companies and customers are made up of people, and the best profits and processes in the world are not

What do you do when you see one of your directs exhibiting the wrong behavior? Do you react? Do you pretend you didn’t notice? Do you call it out immediately? There is a common phrase, which I don’t is well understood, that states: “praise publicly, criticized privately.” While I do

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

  If you were to calculate the actual time lost, meetings that don’t start on time is perhaps one of the single biggest generators of waste in organizations today. A meeting that starts 5 minutes late for 4 people waiting for 1 other person wastes 20 minutes. If it’s a

In today’s politically correct world, conflict is avoided seemingly at all costs. But without active conflict management, good decisions cannot be made. I propose we need more tolerance rather than more sensitivity. As a sign of how overly far sensitivity has gone, we were once told not to use the

In the age of self-help, self-promotion, and self-everything-else, it seems that even basic human principles lose meaning. In this blog post by Manager Tools (which I highly respect and listen to their podcasts) called Be Respectful, it either argues or forwards the argument from Wired Magazine as follows: An article