Earlier this month, for the College Football Playoff championship game, I wrote about “Lessons from the Football Coaching and Leadership Styles of the Oregon Ducks and Ohio State Buckeyes.” I had found articles about both teams in the name of…
Tomorrow afternoon, I’m doing two different webinars that I hope you’ll want to sign up for. Even if you can’t attend live, I’d encourage you to register in advance so you can get links sent to you automatically to view these on…
TL;DR: Working with a personal trainer offered unexpected lessons about coaching, learning, patience, and improvement. Many of the same principles apply to Lean: you can’t learn just by reading, encouragement matters, progress takes time, and effective coaching helps people push…
TL;DR: Strategy deployment works best when leaders treat it as a series of testable hypotheses–not a fixed plan to execute at all costs. Using a PDSA mindset helps organizations focus on a few true-north priorities, learn from results, and adjust…
For Oregon Football, Leadership Doesn’t Mean Yelling and Screaming The stereotype of a football coach is sort of like the stereotype of an Army drill sergeant — lots of yelling and screaming and getting “in your face” when a mistake…
The ideas, principles, and methods that we’d recognize as “Lean” aren’t exclusively of Japanese origin. Many of us, myself included, draw inspiration from Toyota, reading books about them and visiting their factories. For me, I’ve had a chance to visit…
On Friday, LinkedIn published a piece I wrote for their series of articles on the theme of “The Road Not Taken.” LinkedIn asked people to write about the “Plan B” that they may have wished they had pursued. This was difficult…
TL;DR: Not every question is actually a question. Some are directives, some are blame in disguise, and some are just declarative statements wearing a question mark. If you mean to say something directly, it’s usually more respectful to say it…
Mark’s note: Christina Kach is our guest blogger today, with a post about the recent North East Shingo Conference, where she was an attendee. See her past posts here. Recently, my coworkers and I had the opportunity to attend the North East…
Last week, I taught a pilot session of a new class on Kaizen and continuous improvement that I taught for visitors to the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value. Unlike other workshops that have assumed people are starting from scratch, this…
I was recently interviewed by one of the reporters who put together this web article in Canada: “From the factory floor to the emergency department: Hospitals explore Lean method” The article highlights Lean success stories and it also raises some…
People often talk about the need for senior leadership support for Lean. If we’re going to really transform our culture, workplace, and performance, “quality starts in the boardroom,” as Dr. Deming said. Lean is not about “fixing” the employees —…
