tl;dr: This blog post analyzes the unusual incentive clause in the contract of Iowa football’s offensive coordinator, Brian Ferentz, which mandates a minimum average of 25 points per game for his contract to be extended. It questions the efficacy and…
My guest for Episode #400 is Jeffrey Liker, the retired University of Michigan professor who has recently released the second updated and revised version of his seminal book The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer. The new edition…
While I'm writing here about Northwestern men's basketball learning from Duke (without copying everything), the same ideas apply if you're Ford learning from Toyota or a hospital learning from ThedaCare.
When we see a simple error, even in something as silly as sports memorabilia, we would ask "why?" or "how?" instead of "who?" Blaming individuals doesn't help...
...this WSJ article caught my attention: "The Coach Who Won't Leave the Locker Room." The sub headline is "Why Carolina Panthers' Ron Rivera has become obsessed with integrating himself into his players' personal workspace." An NFL coach is at "the gemba" during a game, of course...
We talk about problem solving and continuous improvement in the Lean methodology. How much time should we worry about distinguishing between the problems we CAN solve, the problems we SHOULD solve, and the problems we MUST solve? ...
Many of you don’t care about football, but you might find it interesting, as I did, to learn that Northwestern’s defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz is apparently a fan of Kaizen...
Many of you might not care, but it’s football season. Major college football starts tomorrow night and the NFL kicks off their season next Thursday. On that note, if you’d like to “kick off” a Kaizen approach to continuous improvement…
Although I’m a proud alum of Northwestern University, a former marching band member, and an ardent follower of our football team (as I’ve written about before), I grew up as a fan of the Michigan Wolverines and have many friends…
The Philadelphia Eagles are playing in an NFL playoff matchup tonight against the New Orleans Saints. I’d admired Eagles head coach Chip Kelly and his somewhat unlikely rise through the coaching ranks. He’s well known from his successful stint at…
As the main days of the men’s NCAA basketball tourney (“March Madness”) start Thursday, here’s a topic that might make for fun Lean discussion at work or something that you might possibly bore people with at a tourney watching party…
If you’re a gambler and you take my post title literally, you might be thinking, “The odds? The odds are 1 in 7000, or 0.000142857143.” OK, you probably weren’t thinking that many significant digits, but what’s the point of 1…
