Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email.
News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better.
Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation
Canada keeps its elbows up on the desk to drive productivity but still can't reach the U.S. bench
Canada has historically faced a persistent productivity challenge. We're happy to simply take gains from the cyclical nature of resource and commodity booms rather than invest in systemic efficiency. I recall working in the resource sector during one such boom, where I urged an organization to enhance its productivity (which would've been relatively easy and inexpensive) only to be met with great indifference as they were currently enjoying substantial profit margins and saw no need to address waste or inefficiency.
With the recent realization that Canada could benefit from more self-reliance, Jacob Stoller reminds Canadians of the opportunity we have to drive operational excellence in our organizations. Will we invest more in our people and processes, or will we simply ride the resource wave?
To get to the top, Toyota Racing Development is using…The Toyota Way
Competition without ego. Long term thinking. Compounding incremental improvement. Is the Toyota Way enough to get Toyota drivers to the top of the NASCAR leaderboard? Toyota Racing Development president Tyler Gibbs thinks so.
What is the #1 frustration of operational excellence practitioners?
Katie Anderson surveys 100 operational excellence practitioners and shares what people love about their often unrewarding efforts, and the top frustration they experience. I predict anyone who has worked extensively in improvement in organizations will relate to this episode. Check out Chain of Learning: 52| What You Love About Lean and Operational Excellence – And Your #1 Frustration.
Creating a Culture of Improvement
A wise coach once told me, “When you reward firefighters, you create arsonists.” Sometimes, those who seem to get things done quickly are actually part of the problem, working furiously around broken processes and deeper issues in a endless cycle of urgent fixes. Harley-Davidson avoided rushing to fix everything at once. Instead, they focused on small, continuous improvements to break the cycle of firefighting and prevent the arsonist mindset.
Changing change
Is it time to ditch some of the common axioms of change management? Like change is top-down, linear, and ‘manageable'? Check out this excellent paper, Changing Change: From Heroic Leadership to Collective Agency, which challenges us to abandon widely-accepted frameworks that have little empirical evidence and less relevance in favour of more emergent and collective approaches to leading change.
Coaching – Developing Self & Others
Somewhere between agency and ambivalence
Leading change is exhausting. There is often an internal tug-of-war between agency – the drive to charge forward, and ambivalence – the fear that causes you to hesitate or doubt your actions. Learn more about the emotional strength you need to lead through change.
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Let’s build a culture of continuous improvement and psychological safety—together. If you're a leader aiming for lasting change (not just more projects), I help organizations:
- Engage people at all levels in sustainable improvement
- Shift from fear of mistakes to learning from them
- Apply Lean thinking in practical, people-centered ways
Interested in coaching or a keynote talk? Let’s talk.
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