My guests for Episode #493 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Gene Kim and Steve Spear, co-authors of “Wiring the Winning Organization.” We talk about why so many organizations copy the visible practices of Toyota or Amazon — two…
Steve Spear shares lessons from Hajime Oba, who founded Toyota’s Supplier Support Center (TSSC) and became one of the most influential teachers of the Toyota Production System in North America. In this episode, Spear describes how Mr. Oba looked at…
Today, I’m sharing a preview (in podcast and transcript form) of a webinar that Steve Kane, from Gemba Academy, will presenting on April 8th as part of the KaiNexus webinar series. Coaching Strategies for Leaders It’s free and I hope…
Previous Episodes (Full List): Click to visually browse episodes For easy access to any Podcast, use the forwarding URL: leanblog.org/X where X is the episode number. This text list is from the old version of the podcast’s main blog page.…
Today’s episode #259 is Part 2 of a discussion I started with Steve Bera in episode #256. Steve was one of the original 16 “NUMMI Commandos” that General Motors sent to work with Toyota in the 1980s, as discussed in the…
I’m really excited to have Steve Bera as my guest for episode #256 of the podcast. I read about him as he was featured prominently in a chapter of the 1994 Pulitzer-Prize winning book Comeback: The Fall & Rise of…
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…
Formerly known as “Lean Whiskey” Listen: In Season 2, Episode 8, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh settle in with single-origin coffees, and circle back to a topic that’s been bouncing around the lean world for forty years: NUMMI. But first,…
TL;DR: Organizations invest in teaching people to see problems and solve problems — but skip the middle step: making it safe and worthwhile to speak up about them. I’ve seen blank huddle boards in hospitals. Cards and markers sitting untouched.…
TL;DR: GM said it believed in long-term thinking. NUMMI actually practiced it. A 1987 GM executive summary admitted that short-term financial pressure drove decisions at GM far more than at NUMMI. The difference wasn’t philosophy — it was system design.…
Why do capable leaders spend their days firefighting instead of improving the system? In this episode, MIT professor Nelson Repenning explains how poorly designed work systems trap organizations in chaos–and how Lean thinking and Dynamic Work Design help leaders restore…
In this episode of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast, Carlos Scholz discusses Lean healthcare leadership, psychological safety, and humility–why improvement depends on leadership behaviors, not just tools or events. Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest…
