All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Mark’s Note: Today’s post is a second guest post from a new blogger, Chad Walters. His first post appeared last Friday. I was happy to be able to meet up with Chad to share some local Dallas BBQ while he…
A Vivid Example of Gaming the Numbers on “The Office” NBC’s “The Office” is often a good source for clips that illustrate the opposite of Lean thinking. Last week’s episode continued the subplot where the new CEO assigned Andy, the…
“Kaizen” is a Japanese word that means “change for the better” in the context of ongoing “continuous improvement.” The so-called “kaizen event,” a weeklong focused improvement effort is one type of kaizen, but it’s not the only type. A powerful…
When it first came out, I was a big fan of Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game about the Oakland A’s major league baseball team and the unorthodox approach they took to building a team (under…
Mark’s Note: Today’s post is a guest post from a new blogger, Chad Walters. Chad and I share a strong interest in sports — me as a fan and Chad as somebody who is working to bring Lean thinking to…
I always like to give a brief shout out to new sponsors when I have them. I have a brand new sponsor, starting out for the next two months, in a company that will be relevant to a Lean audience…
I love employee ideas and continuous improvement, but I really dislike suggestion boxes. As I’ve said, they are well intended, but the whole suggestion box process is usually pretty ineffective. I see more and more articles about the failures of…
As I wrote about after his death, I am appreciative of the products and services that Steve Jobs brought to the world. That said, some of his behavior, as reported in the biography written by Walter Isaacson (the simply titled…
As I was cleaning out a pile of stuff in my office, I found an unread issue of Inc. magazine from June 2011. One of their “Best Small Company Workplaces” was Hopkins Printing in Columbus, Ohio: “Survival of the Smartest:…
My Healthcare Kaizen co-author Joe Swartz works in Indianapolis in the Franciscan St. Francis Health System. They use the term “kaizeneer” to describe those employees and staff members who initiate and participate in “kaizen,” or continuous improvement, activities. One of…
Here are a few updates about my blog and my podcasts. For one, I’ve now been blogging for seven years now. I’ll write a blog post soon with my reflections on the anniversary/birthday of my blog. The other updates: My…
If you’re watching college football bowls or the NFL playoffs, it’s hard not to see this commercial from DirecTV. It’s not exactly the reverse of the “5 Whys” (as popularized in Lean and the Lean Startup methods), but it made…
