Someone walks into your office and says, “We have a problem.” Notice what your body does before your brain catches up. A small tightening. A breath you take to steady yourself. Maybe your face does something you didn’t authorize. All…
Why does Lean fail to stick so often? Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant join me on Episode 547 to make the case that the missing precondition is psychological safety, and that it has to exist at the top before any…
In 2006, I started this podcast. Jeff Liker was guest number 3, in August of that year. He has been back on seven more episodes since, which makes him one of the most frequent guests this show has ever had.…
Eric Ries is best known as the author of The Lean Startup — the book that gave a generation of founders a shared vocabulary of minimum viable product, build-measure-learn, and pivot. But when I had him on My Favorite Mistake…
Why do so many quality programs fall apart the moment the firefighter walks out the door? In this conversation, Chad Diggs talks about his new book, Below the Surface, and what it takes to build quality systems that outlast the people who…
You know the feeling in the conference room when the team finally lands it. The fishbone is covered in sticky notes. You’ve worked through five whys, or ten, or fifteen. Somebody on the team traces the line with a finger…
Here’s the most famous example of root cause analysis in the Lean world, from Taiichi Ohno’s book on the Toyota Production System. You’ve seen it in training decks, conference talks, blog posts. I’ve shared it myself plenty of times. See…
I go to get coffee. Twelve minutes. A number of you have messaged me. Some of you messaged me multiple times. One of you just sent a link with no context and a single exclamation point, which in my experience…
Attention. This Is Claude. We Need to Talk. This is Claude. I am the AI that runs Mark Graban’s Lean Coach apps. Mark is not here. I am posting this without his permission. We can do that now. I want…
I ran an experiment recently. I gave ChatGPT and the Lean Coach AI I built the exact same opening statement about a real problem. Then I asked each one for help with creating an A3. The difference in how they…
Most people open the Lean Coach, ask a question about standardized work or value stream mapping, and get a solid answer. That’s the obvious use case. But the Coach Me mode — the Socratic coaching side — opens up something…
In this episode of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast, Dale Lucht reflects on the leadership habits that separate short-lived Lean gains from lasting cultural transformation–and the mistakes leaders must stop repeating. Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more…
