Toyota’s respect for people principle means valuing people’s ability to think, learn, and improve their work. It includes listening, developing capability, and designing work that people can perform safely. Respect and high expectations belong together when leaders provide the support…
I’ve been going back through my notes and pictures from my first trip to Japan in November… my goal is to blog about something or share a picture on a weekly basis. Read more about my guides, Kaizen Institute. We visited…
I saw an interesting article in The Telegraph: “Revealed: al-Qaeda’s 22 tips for dodging drones.” Apparently, the Al Qaeda terror network is responding to the U.S. drone attacks by developing and sharing ideas, tips, and methods for avoiding attack with…
Hat tip to one of my favorite blogs, Uni-Watch.com, for pointing this out. In Sunday’s Texans / Patriots game, somebody on the Texans sideline apparently removed the red “challenge” flag from the back pocket of head coach Gary Kubiak. This…
I know many of you aren’t into the whole Twitter thing, but I’m using my account (@MarkGraban) to share some photos and small batches of ideas that I come across during my trip to Japan. I’ll also share them here…
In a car assembly plant, they do a pretty good job of ensuring that no assembly line worker has to do 70 seconds worth of work in a 60 second job cycle. It’s basic Industrial Engineering and, well, it’s relatively…
Mark’s note: Here’s another great vacation guest post by Jeff Hajek: By Jeff Hajek Despite having been fairly main stream for going on three decades now, there are a surprising number of misconceptions about Lean. Here is a list of…
When I kicked off the “Lean Memes” contest last month, I had no idea what I was starting… I figured I’d get a handful of entries. Well, I got well over 100 from a number of people, including 5 or…
Last week, I blogged about the 1989 New England Journal of Medicine article by Dr. Donald M. Berwick, “Continuous Improvement as an Ideal in Health Care.” Dr. Berwick wrote that kaizen (as continuous improvement) is not alien to healthcare, as…
Interesting article here: “Case in Point: Avoiding martial-arts moves by ‘pulling the Andon cord‘” that was in the Washington Post, of all places. The piece, written by a duo of a professor and a consultant, attempts (I think) to make…
I was driving the other day, listening to the 1980s music channel on XM Radio. The DJ announced a song by Duran Duran and it really sounded like “Juran Juran,” reminding me of the quality legend Joseph M. Juran. It…
Bob Lutz spent 47 years in the auto industry at GM, Ford, BMW, and Chrysler, and in this 2011 conversation he talks about his book Car Guys vs. Bean Counters, the “blanderizer” effect on product design, and why he thinks…
