A lunch, a hand gesture, and the question most Lean implementations are answering backwards. The gesture is the whole thing. The late Hajime Oba held his hands out in front of him, palms down, one higher than the other. “All…
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…
Two questions from a few Toyota mentors — and the Deming idea behind them. You can usually feel it before you can name it. The improvement meeting that used to feel alive is now… polite. People show up. They nod…
In 2006, I started this podcast. Jeff Liker was guest number 3, in August of that year. He has been back on seven more episodes since, which makes him one of the most frequent guests this show has ever had.…
Somewhere along the way in my career, someone handed me a copy of “The Toyota Production System,” published by Toyota Motor Corporation in April 1992. I don’t remember who gave it to me. The document itself is unassuming – a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
TL;DR: Lean doesn’t fail because people resist change. It struggles when organizations ask for participation without earning belief. Don Ephlin saw this decades ago: behavior changes when people believe, not when they’re told to obey. That distinction still explains why…