All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
TL;DR: Deciding feels like progress, and learning is what makes a solution hold. This is a working hypothesis about why executive problem solving so often skips the second part, and where I suspect it falls apart. The meeting goes well.…
Want to start 2026 with a better mindset around leadership, culture, and continuous improvement? As we begin the year, it’s a natural time to reflect–not just on what went well last year, but also on what didn’t, and what we…
Charts like this always make me wonder why we throw away the additional context of data from 2016 when we start the 2017 chart.
It's unlikely that January 1st in any given year is the magical creation of a new system or a new process. In other words, January 2017 was likely the same process as December 2016. The annual cutoffs are arbitrary. Sure, people are accustomed to thinking in annual cycles, but is this helpful for improvement?
TL;DR: A Lean-themed Christmas song parody that mixes kaizen, gemba, and holiday humor–just for fun, and maybe a little reflection. Here’s a musical holiday treat for my regular Lean Blog readers and podcast listeners, a song parody, initially released in…
TL;DR: These were the 10 most-read LeanBlog.org posts from July-December 2025, based on Google Analytics. Each year, I take a year-end look at what readers are finding most helpful, most shareable, and most interesting across LeanBlog.org. It’s a chance to…
tl;dr: Headlines comparing two years of measles cases can be misleading. Looking at the full CDC time series with Process Behavior Charts shows that not every increase is meaningful. From 2000-2013, U.S. measles cases fluctuated as noise within a stable…
The Christmas Tale / Le Conte de Noël Two years ago, I received an unexpected and incredibly specific Christmas gift from Charles Desneuf on LinkedIn. He wrote a PDF eBook about Process Behavior Charts… and Christmas! This led to Charles…
A 2005 tour of the NUMMI plant revealed lessons about Lean that had little to do with tools and everything to do with leadership, learning, and respect for people. Twenty years later, these small, human moments still define what Lean…
In a webinar I hosted with Sandro Casagrande from Electrolux, we reflected on the 20-year evolution of their Electrolux Manufacturing System (EMS). One of the highlights was hearing how KaiNexus became part of that journey starting in 2017. You can…
This edition of Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape explores how technology, leadership, and culture intersect in continuous improvement. Topics range from AI-driven quality engineering and jidoka in an AI era to healthcare process improvement, humility in leadership, and the importance…
KaiNexus recently hosted a webinar I was especially looking forward to: “Unlock the Power of Leadership: The Electrolux Manufacturing System (EMS) Way,” presented by Sandro Casagrande from Electrolux. The session took place on December 10 at 1 pm Eastern, and…
Why do so many Lean efforts fail in offices, engineering, and executive work? In this episode, Don Kieffer explains why copying Toyota’s rituals misses the point–and how Dynamic Work Design applies Toyota thinking to intellectual work, leadership systems, and real…