All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
So many of our business metrics are reported in terms of two-data point comparisons. How much did the metric change from last week? Web site traffic is up 14% from last month. So that’s good? Maybe. Two data points…
I've been going through the book by the late Peter Scholtes: The Leader's Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done. His work builds upon the legendary W. Edwards Deming and Russell Ackoff, among others.
I often quote Scholtes (something also attributed to Peter Senge and others) as saying:
"People don't resist change, they resist being changed."
I think that's very insightful and that thought has led me to study change management, "motivational interviewing" and other related topics. It turns out that having the right answer and pushing it on others isn't the best strategy for effecting sustainable change. I had to learn those lessons the hard way and I'm still learning.
TL;DR: Quality posters and slogans don’t improve performance–they signal that management expects people to “try harder” instead of fixing broken systems. As Deming taught, most quality problems come from management-controlled systems, not worker effort. Remove the posters. Substitute leadership. Back…
Here’s another post on the theme of performance metrics, as I’m talking about next week at Lean Startup Week (see yesterday’s post or others in this series). At the risk of becoming a broken record, it saddens me to see…
As next week’s Lean Startup Week approaches, I’m pretty laser focused on preparation for my: Eric Ries, author of The Startup Way and the founder of this event, cited Dr. W. Edwards Deming multiple times in his first book The Lean Startup.…
My guest for Episode 291 is my friend and colleague, Jeff Roussel (@jeff_roussel on Twitter). Jeff is the VP of Sales at KaiNexus, a technology company that I have been involved with for over six years. As Jeff will humbly…
Who are the “champions of change” in your organization? Is your CEO a champion of change? How many of your front-line managers and staff are champions of change? Are you? What does it mean to be a champion of change?…
As you might know from episode #290 of my podcast with Eric Ries on Monday, his new book was released on Tuesday: The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth. I think there are…
TL;DR: Many Lean healthcare job postings fail because they expect a single mid-level hire to “fix” culture, strategy, and results–while executives delegate leadership instead of practicing it. Overemphasis on certifications, industry “insider” status, and toolkits (Lean, Six Sigma, PDSA) misses…
This Business Insider article caught my eye the other day: A celebrity chef who owns 26 restaurants explains why he loves when employees shoot down his ideas I’ve eaten at a José Andrés tapas restaurant in Las Vegas before. So I…
Joining me again for episode 290 is a three-time guest, Eric Ries. When we first talked, in episode 115 six years ago, his New York Times bestselling book The Lean Startup was being published. In 2012, we discussed the impact of Toyota's Taiichi Ohno on his work, in episode 142. This time, we're talking about his new book, The Startup Way.
The other day, I posted Episode #289 of the podcast, in which Kathleen Sharp and David Schoenwetter made some great points about respecting “push back” or “resistance to change.” I’ve now posted a PDF summary of the podcast and you can…
