Podcast #104 is a discussion with Dr. Peter Patterson (@IDrPete), a friend of mine and the Lean Blog the past few years. He wrote a guest post for me back in 2009 (A Breakthrough in Training: Call it “Near-TWI”) and…
As I blogged about on Friday, I was back at my alma mater, Northwestern, for a football game this weekend– well, actually, I was at Wrigley Field instead of our usual home stadium. The “confines” of “The Friendly Confines” (as…
I’m really excited that I’m going to be attending tomorrow’s Northwestern football game that’s being played at Wrigley Field, the legendary baseball stadium that opened in 1912. This will be the first college game played there since 1938 and the…
Short post today, but a simple message, I think. One of the best lessons I’ve learned about Lean management is about the need to ask “why?” Don’t assume, don’t blame – ask why. It’s a very common situation in a…
Through the @LEIhealthcare twitter account, one source of autotweets are the new threads started in the Lean Enterprise Institute forums. One new thread was started last week, titled “Sitter Ratios,” that caught my eye. Unfortunately, many of the Lean web…
The full article requires a subscription, but John Toussaint and I were each quoted in this article from last Friday: “Toyota techniques drive profit, efficiency gains at Moffitt.” As with many of these articles, the full story tells a picture…
TL;DR (2026): This interview with Masaaki Imai still matters because it captures an early, unvarnished view of how “respect for people” was practiced–not idealized–by Taiichi Ohno and Toyota. It reminds today’s Lean leaders that respect doesn’t mean being soft or…
My guest for Episode #103 is Matthew E. May, returning to talk about his latest book, a business fable called The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meaningful Change. I’ve been reading the book and have found it to be…
I saw a nice article by author Daniel Pink (most recently the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us) called “Think Tank: Fix the workplace, not the workers.” Without directly referencing Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Pink often…
You might remember me blogging about the Indianapolis incident where three babies died after being mistakenly given an adult dose of heparin back in 2007. The same set of failure modes led to a non-fatal overdose of actor Dennis Quaid’s…
There’s a long-standing argument that I’ve been dragged into with a group that calls itself “new systems thinkers.” They loudly criticize Lean as being altogether awful (with the alternative, predictably, being their services). One of them wrote a blog post…
This headline jumped out at me: “Local hospital receives $500,000 to train workers.” What also jumped out at me, in the article, is that the money comes from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (commonly referred to as the…