Below is a guest post from fellow author and Lean Healthcare practitioner, Naida Grunden. Her book, The Pittsburgh Way to Efficient Healthcare: Improving Patient Care Using Toyota Based Methods, is an outstanding collection of principles and case examples from the…
Steve Spear spent six months embedded with a Toyota team as a doctoral student, learning the Toyota Production System by teaching it to a supplier in Kentucky. In this episode, he explains what he calls “high velocity” organizations — companies…
Industry News: GM To Offer Zero-Percent Financing, Raise Prices, Screen Hummer Buyers It’s very hard to figure out what GM is thinking these days. In the first link above, the Jalopnik blog highlights an inconsistency I also noticed… it’s the…
I’ve often done posts titled “A Lean Guy Reads the WSJ” — I would create a link to them, but I’m currently suffering a bit of an internet glitch (can anyone help?) I’m in the UK, but my hotel’s internet…
Yahoo! News Updated: No real updates in the news, maybe we’ll learn more in the morning… but a few more thoughts of mine added below. Toyota (as well as other Japanese automakers, including Nissan) is having to shut down a…
Gourmet Coffee Becomes The Latest Office Perk – WSJ.com Here’s another installment of “A lean guy reads the Wall Street Journal.” It’s fun sometimes looking for lean concepts in the WSJ, even when it’s not a front page story about…
Editor’s Note (2026):Nearly 20 years after this post was written, Toyota’s approach to supplier relationships remains a powerful counterexample to short-term, cost-driven thinking. In an era of fragile supply chains and recurring disruptions, the Toyota Way’s emphasis on long-term partnerships,…