Search Results for eric ries

GE Gets a Lean CEO, From the Outside: Larry Culp

Jet lag, even well managed and planned for, meant I was awake early on a Sunday morning. Over breakfast, I read more about news from last week, that GE had fired their CEO John Flannery after 14 months and replaced him with a relatively new board member, Larry Culp.

Culp is GE's first outsider CEO hire in their 100+ year history. So who is this guy and why did they hire him?

Culp was CEO of Danaher, a company that's quite often held up as the best non-Toyota Lean company out there. And they're an American company. Danaher, through its Danaher Business System (DBS) approach, uses Lean as a business strategy in a way that's very different than Toyota. Danaher has acquired companies and brought DBS and Lean in as a way to turn around and improve those businesses.

“Why?” Not “Who?” Fixing Systems, Not Blaming Workers

Today's post is the first contribution from Shrikant Kalegaonkar, a frequent commenter here on the blog, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We had a chance to meet in Austin last year and I appreciate his shared interests in Lean, statistical process control (ala Deming and Wheeler), and quality improvement. He initiated this piece and I ended up collaborating with him on it. I hope it sparks some healthy discussion...

Archived List of Podcast Episodes

Previous Episodes (Full List): Click to visually browse episodes For easy access to any Podcast, use the forwarding URL: leanblog.org/X where X is the episode number. This text list is from the old version of the podcast’s main blog page.…

Should Lean Conferences Add a “Code of Conduct” for Speakers and Attendees?

In today's post, I pose a question: Should the major Lean conferences adopt or adapt a practice that's now common at tech events, including Agile and Lean Startup events: a "Code of Conduct" for participants and attendees. Is this a countermeasure to a problem that doesn't exist in the Lean community? Or, is it still good to proactively encourage people to speak up to conference organizers if they are subject to bad behavior during the event? In this post, I get feedback and thoughts from the Lean Enterprise Institute, AME, Catalysis, Lean Frontiers, and the Shingo Institute.

The Joy and the Pain of Overreacting to Metrics

As next week’s Lean Startup Week approaches, I’m pretty laser focused on preparation for my: Eric Ries, author of The Startup Way and the founder of this event, cited Dr. W. Edwards Deming multiple times in his first book The Lean Startup.…

Don’t Turn Your Performance Metrics into Success Theater

TL;DR: Cherry-picked metrics can make performance look better without actually improving it. Process Behavior Charts help leaders distinguish real improvement from noise, stop overreacting, and focus on improving the system instead of explaining fluctuations. One of the phrases and concepts…