I received an email from Norway, asking a question I couldn’t answer, so I’m turning it to the blog readers:

[ I work for a] European media group based in Norway . We have around 8.500 employees and operations in 20 countries.

We have for some time experimented with Lean in our company, mainly through a few pilots.

Our main learning from these pilots is that our top managers lack the necessary knowledge and commitment to move into a larger Lean transformation.

To confront this we are now including our top managers in a Lean Best Practice study. During the study we aim at visiting (already transformed) Lean companies and Lean research communities.

I’ve been reading through your great blog, but can’t seem to find anything about media companies going lean.

You wouldn’t by any chance know of any? We would be very eager to visit them.

And since I’m already bothering you with this email, which other companies and research companies would you recommend us to visit?

What do you think or suggest? Click “comments” to let us know. What Lean companies (in any industry) would you suggest touring in Scandinavia or Europe?

Here is part of my response back:

“… you might not find another “lean” company exactly like yours to study and learn from. I hope that wouldn’t stop you from trying Lean. Think of the excitement if we had been at the first hospital to use Lean? They didn’t have anyone exactly like them to model themselves after. But, it can be done. I’d recommend doing your best to understand the basic high-level lean concepts then start doing experiments. What business problems need solving? Try what you think will work in rapid experiments and learn as you go. That might take longer and you might make some mistakes along the way, but you might end up with better results by going that route.”

About LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology, focused on improving quality and patient safety, improving access, reducing costs, and fully engaging healthcare professionals. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus.