Year 2007

Toyota’s New Plant?

AP Wire | 01/20/2007 | Toyota narrows choice for plant to two, newspaper reports Toyota is down to two choices, Arkansas, and Tennessee, supposedly. Looking back a few weeks, is Toyota fearful of a political backlash or are they charging…

Two Years of Lean Blogging

stats

Lean Blog: Misunderstandings About Value Stream Mapping, Flow Analysis, and Takt Time The link above is my first blog post, from January 2005 (back when the blog looked like this). I let the blog “birthday” slip by again this year.…

People in the Middle

toyota-triangle

This is my version of a Toyota diagram (click on it for a larger view) showing the “integrated system” of the Toyota Production System. Notice how “Human Development” is put in the middle, no surprise there. The three balancing sides…

Why do Leaders Struggle?

In a follow up to another short post, “Bad Employees or Bad Leader?“ I’ll pose this question, which should be answered in a “5 Whys” format (or as many whys as you can get through): Why do many leaders struggle…

Art Byrne from Wiremold / Lean Thinking

Thanks to blog reader Osvaldo for passing this long. If you’ve read Lean Thinking or anything about Wiremold’s lean journey and wondered about Art Byrne, here’s an update on what he’s doing today. Update: An oversight on my part, I…

Hospitals and Lean

STLtoday – Business – Story Here is an overview and general awareness article from the St. Louis paper. It’s always nice to see lean (and lean healthcare) in the general media. The goal is to map out and retool processes…

Bad Employees or Bad Leader?

Question for the blog readers: A person working in a lean effort complains “My employees won’t follow the standard work.” Bad leader, bad employees, or both? Your thoughts? Please check out my main blog page at www.leanblog.org The RSS feed…

NBA’s David Stern on Listening

‘Welcome to My World’ – WSJ.com: You might remember the story about how the NBA unilaterally changed to a new ball without much input from the players (or that was the complaint). The NBA later reversed course and went back…

Society for Health Systems Conference

Any of the healthcare readers out there attending the SHS conference in New Orleans in February? If so, send me a message via the email link in the left column, maybe we can have a LeanBlog get together. Please check…

"Being Mean Is So Last Millennium"

Business Week Article OK, so here’s the palette cleanser after my Bob Nardelli rant. I like to keep a positive piece at the top of blog for good blog karma. It’s a companion piece about another guy who was passed…

"You can’t s*** on your employees"

Business Week: Out At Home Depot As more details about the former Home Depot “leader” and his “leadership” come out, it’s a sad case study of bad leadership (written about earlier, at risk of being accused of Shadenfreude). Why am…