I’ve read the first chapter of Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way. I’m obviously not going to get through the whole thing before my podcast interview with Jeff Liker tomorrow. If you have questions for the…
In this Lean Blog Podcast episode, Jim Womack reflects on GM, Ford, and Toyota through the lens of Lean thinking–past, present, and future. He explains how Lean was coined at MIT, why it became misunderstood, and what leaders still get…
Thanks to Pete for findng this and sending it my way. This link takes you to an animation thats apparently produced for Toyota Sweden. Here is the animation with English subtitles (you can view this with or without sound). The…
Here is LeanBlog Podcast #4, again featuring Dr. Jeffrey Liker, My guest for episode #4 of the Lean Blog Podcast is Dr. Jeffrey Liker, professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. This is part two of…
My guest for episode three of the Lean Blog Podcast is Dr. Jeffrey Liker, professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and author of The Toyota Way. Liker has spent decades studying how Toyota actually works,…
IndustryWeek : Continuous Improvement This is a new recurring column from Industry Week. The author makes the pitch that companies shouldn’t “forget about” continuous improvement in the face of today’s other manufacturing issues (competition from China, Chinese currency issues, etc.).…
Phoebe Wall Howard reported recently that a fired GM engineer is suing the company over its employee evaluation system. Tuan Le, 58, spent 27 years at General Motors, moving from industrial engineer to senior throughput simulation engineer. GM terminated him…
For three weeks after his surgery, a patient at the Royal Oldham Hospital (England) had no bowel movement and was in increasing pain. The ward sister kept raising patient safety concerns with the surgeon who’d operated on him. She described…
At Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, a nurse named Candice Bena decided a 76-year-old patient needed a new intravenous line. Radiology couldn’t install it right away. She was worried about infection, so she called Richard Shannon, who was chairman of…
When I was a young engineer at GM’s Livonia Engine Plant in the mid-1990s, I wrote down some of the things production workers said to me. One of them stuck, a worker in a machining department: “I want to stop…
I just got back from a vacation that included some time in Greece. On the way to the airport, we stopped for a slow, delicious breakfast at a seaside cafe. Excellent food, better view. Check out the menu and some…
A nurse executive posted on LinkedIn this week about what she called “assembly-line medicine.” She was describing an ambulatory surgery center where she once worked, where physicians booked roughly 80 percent of the day’s procedures into a six-hour window. Then…