Dan Markovitz

Dan Markovitz

Dan Markovitz is president of Markovitz Consulting, a firm that radically improves operational speed and efficiency by applying lean concepts to knowledge work. He is a faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute and teaches at the Stanford University Continuing Studies Program. He also lectures on A3 thinking at the Ohio State University’s Fisher School of Business. Dan is a frequent speaker and presenter at conferences, and has consulted to organizations as diverse as Camelbak, Clif Bar, Abbott Vascular, WL Gore & Associates, Intel, the City of Menlo Park, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. His book, A Factory of One, was honored with a Shingo Research Award in 2013. Dan has also published articles in the Harvard Business Review blog, Quality Progress, Industry Week magazine, Reliable Plant magazine, and Management Services Journal, among other magazines. All of these articles are available for download on the Resources page. Earlier in his career, he held management positions in product marketing at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger, where he worked in sales, product marketing, and product development. He also has experience as an entrepreneur, having founded his own skateboarding footwear company. Dan lived in Japan for four years and is fluent in Japanese. He holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Booz Gets Lean (without knowing it)

by Dan Markovitz The latest issue of Strategy+Business, Booz Allen Hamilton’s business journal, features an article on cost cutting. Ordinarily, simple cost cutting flies in the face of real lean, but in this case, the authors’ recommendations incorporate an important…

What About The Other Car Makers?

by Dan Markovitz This blog has commented (here and here) on the WSJ’s rush to predict the folly of just-in-time manufacturing in the wake of the earthquake last week that crippled Japanese auto production. (“Blame it on kanban, the just-in-time…

The Normalcy Of Waste

By Dan Markovitz Last week the Wall Street Journal interviewed George David, the CEO of United Technologies. Though the conversation didn’t address his views on lean, he decries all forms of waste: You can’t walk through life with a trained…

Clarifying Lean vs. Frugal

By Dan Markovitz There’s been some confusion over my recent post criticizing the Business Week article on Toyota’s “frugality.” I do not believe that Toyota is frugal (read: “cheap”). Rather, I believe that the company is simply focused on value.…

What Will You Do Differently Today?

By Dan MarkovitzBack in October, Lifehacker ran a lengthy article on “personal kaizen.” The thrust of the piece is how we can improve our lives by adopting the kaizen approach of the TPS and applying it to our own work…

Newsflash! Respecting workers = better results!

By Dan Markovitz Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ran an article explaining that employees are more likely to embrace changes when they’re fully informed of the rationale behind those changes. What?!?!?!? You mean that performance relates to worker involvement?!?!? Shocking!!! Foremost…

Error Proofing Your Meetings

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By Dan Markovitz Sometimes it’s hard to spot errors in an office, much less error-proof the workspace. With so many value streams running through each knowledge worker, and so much of the value being intangible and invisible, error-proofing is tricky.…

The 5S Workplace: Cause or Effect?

By Dan Markovitz, Time Back Management: A response to an earlier post… Is messiness really beneficial? I think the authors of A Perfect Mess make a silly distinction. On the one hand, you have order for order’s sake. The authors…