No. The claim that “Lean is for speed and Six Sigma is for quality” misrepresents both methodologies. Lean — based on the Toyota Production System — improves safety, quality, delivery, cost, and morale (SQDCM) together, with built-in quality (jidoka) as…
Mike Stoecklein recalls a story secondhand. It was, he thinks, at one of the last four-day seminars W. Edwards Deming ever gave. Deming was frail by then. Someone later told Mike that when the seminar got to the Red Bead…
MLB’s first month with robot umpires gave us a 7.3% jump in walks, a five-minute increase in average game time, and a series of headlines asking you to have an opinion. Most of the leaders I respect would shrug. That…
A hospital VP I worked with once told her board the number of infections had dropped from 4 to 3. She got a small round of congratulations. The next quarter, it went to 5, and she had to explain what…
tl;dr: The “two consecutive reds” rule persists because reacting feels like leadership — but it generates wasted investigations, false success stories, and eroded trust. Process Behavior Charts tell you when variation actually means something changed. I’m writing about something that…
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…
Tl;DR: Leaders unintentionally create fear by overreacting to variation, waste, and mistakes. That fear quietly kills improvement. This post connects the threads across my four books to show why leadership reaction — not tools — shapes the system. You review…
Headlines say Bourbon is in crisis: Yeah, this looks bad. Look at that decline! This chart supports headlines like: And it’s not just Bourbon, it’s wine and alcohol in general. There were plenty more like this. These headlines are written…
One of the most overlooked–and most powerful–principles in Lean management is also the very first principle of the Toyota Way: “Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.” This principle is foundational.…
Charts like this always make me wonder why we throw away the additional context of data from 2016 when we start the 2017 chart.
It's unlikely that January 1st in any given year is the magical creation of a new system or a new process. In other words, January 2017 was likely the same process as December 2016. The annual cutoffs are arbitrary. Sure, people are accustomed to thinking in annual cycles, but is this helpful for improvement?
Process Behavior Charts help leaders distinguish signal from noise in their metrics, so they can stop overreacting to routine variation and focus on real improvement. Instead of asking people to explain every up and down in performance, these charts provide a…
tl;dr: Headlines comparing two years of measles cases can be misleading. Looking at the full CDC time series with Process Behavior Charts shows that not every increase is meaningful. From 2000-2013, U.S. measles cases fluctuated as noise within a stable…
