All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Why do so many quality programs fall apart the moment the firefighter walks out the door? In this conversation, Chad Diggs talks about his new book, Below the Surface, and what it takes to build quality systems that outlast the people who…
The public conversation about AI is dominated by cheerleaders and doomers. Both camps are loud. Neither is very useful when you’re trying to decide whether to use AI on a Monday morning. Most working Lean people I talk to sit…
“Challengers” A college friend of mine sent me a photo from Oslo recently. He’d spotted a display about IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad and his “challengers” just outside the Nobel Peace Prize Center and the National Museum, and sent the translation…
Mike Stoecklein recalls a story secondhand. It was, he thinks, at one of the last four-day seminars W. Edwards Deming ever gave. Deming was frail by then. Someone later told Mike that when the seminar got to the Red Bead…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
Formerly known as “Lean Whiskey” Listen: In Season 2, Episode 8, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh settle in with single-origin coffees, and circle back to a topic that’s been bouncing around the lean world for forty years: NUMMI. But first,…
TL;DR: Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy is a useful provocation for Lean practitioners. Lean already knows how to test small, low-cost ideas without demanding an airtight ROI in advance. We sometimes forget. A Small Idea, Quietly Killed A few years ago, I…
MLB’s first month with robot umpires gave us a 7.3% jump in walks, a five-minute increase in average game time, and a series of headlines asking you to have an opinion. Most of the leaders I respect would shrug. That…
A food company had a flowchart any auditor would love. Every step mapped. Every step mapped. Every critical control point identified. The HACCP plan (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, the standard food safety framework that identifies where contamination can…
In March 2007, Jim Womack told me about his biggest disappointment. The Machine That Changed the World had been out for more than sixteen years, sold around a million copies, and was about to be reissued with an updated subtitle:…
Three years ago, The Mistakes That Make Us came out. Around the same time, Elisabeth Swan published Picture Yourself a Leader. Both books’ third birthdays felt like a decent reason to get together and talk together and bring in some…
Most hospital quality dashboards are designed to answer one question: Are we OK? Green means yes. Red means no. The trouble is, once the answer is green, nobody asks the more useful question: what did we do, and is it…
