tl;dr: GE’s 1950s “Blue Books,” created by Peter Drucker for CEO Ralph Cordiner, promoted stewardship, shared responsibility to stakeholders, and mature leadership. These ideas contrast sharply with later, short-term, numbers-driven management–and raise the question of whether today’s GE still recognizes…
Mark’s Note: Today’s post is by Andy Wagner, who contributed regularly to this blog from 2007 to 2010. This CNN video caught his eye and he couldn’t help blogging about it. Recently, CNN ran a short piece on Worksman Cycles…
Mark’s Note: Here’s part 4 of a series by our guest blogger, Andy Wagner. Start reading with Part 1 here. “What lies behind us and what lies in front of us pales in comparison to what lies within us.” —…
Mark’s Note: Here’s part 3 of a series by our guest blogger, Andy Wagner – a series that started here. Many of us work in an environment that our host, Mark Graban, would characterize as “non-Deming”: LAME more often than…
Mark’s note: One more guest post, Andy Wagner following up his recent guest post, “Being the Change.” Each morning at work the day starts with a production meeting. That is where I get my list of fires to put…
Mark’s note: Today, I’m happy to welcome back an old Lean Blog contributor, Andy Wagner. He takes a more personal turn here than most of my guest bloggers for the next two weeks, writing about the application of Lean thinking…
Mark’s note: It’s great to welcome Andy Wagner back to the blog. Read his older posts here. General Motors, Chrysler, and Toyota have been dominating the headlines in recent months with their financial and, now, quality troubles, while some surprising…
By Andy Wagner: The New York Times recently published an essay by Matthew Crawford, based on his new book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. In his inquiry into the value of work, Crawford takes…
By Andy Wagner: This summer, I am supervising three interns. The first week one of them asked what “lean six sigma” was about. She had heard about it, and that our company was into it, but didn’t really know much…
By Andy Wagner: I’ve been in industry for a little over ten years now, reading and thinking about lean for at least seven. Thanks to Mark, I’ve been writing about lean for about two years. I’ve read about first-time-yield, customer…
By Andrew Wagner: My wife, the resident space geek, turned me in the direction of this Boeing Press Release on their new lean “pulse line” for building GPS satellites, and presumably other satellites. Most of the post is your standard…
I stumbled across a piece Richard Feynman spoke some time ago about “Cargo Cult Science” and couldn’t help but extend the analogy to “Cargo Cult Lean”, or as Mark’s named it, “LAME: Lean as Mistakenly Executed.” First off, what is…
