LinkedIn has a genre of infographic that’s very popular right now… that’s mostly right. You’ve perhaps seen them. A clean illustration of a Toyota assembly line, a worker reaching up for a cord, and a caption along the lines of:…
Picking up the thread from the previous post on Toyota’s April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” This one’s about the line-stop rope or andon cord. The booklet describes the mechanism with care. From the jidoka section: “The ‘fixed-position stop…
In 2007, I wrote about a BBC article that included a number I’ve never quite been able to shake. Workers at Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky plant were pulling the andon cord – the mechanism that lets any worker stop the line…
The Real Lesson from Japan Wasn’t Tools — It Was Trust and Listening TL;DR: When a group of Ford and UAW leaders traveled to Japan in 1981, they went looking for secrets — faster machines, tighter processes, smarter tools. What…
TL;DR: Learning from mistakes requires more than problem-solving tools — it requires psychological safety.In this Shingo Institute webinar, Mark Graban explains why fear and futility prevent people from speaking up, how Toyota and healthcare organizations respond constructively to mistakes, and…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #489 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Ward Vuillemot, a seasoned C-suite executive with over six years of leading fully remotely while building technology organizations from…
Long story short: Things were broken on my blog where readers couldn’t comment. That’s now fixed. But I’ll share the story of my problem solving adventures. In the first decade or more of this blog (2005 to 2015 we’ll call…
I don’t blog about every mistake I make (although it might seem otherwise, sometimes). I do try to share stories that might help illustrate concepts about Lean or problem-solving. This past week, within about 24 hours, there were three examples…
Scroll down for info, videos about Lucid Motors, how to subscribe, and more My guest for Episode #410 of the Lean Blog Interviews podcast is Keith Champion, Senior Manager of Operational Excellence at Lucid Motors, a new entrant in the…
In Episode 10 of Lean Whiskey, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh do their best to work through technology issues, as the Grinch clearly didn’t want us to record. We apologize if this affected the final product just a little bit,…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients If you set a target without providing a clear path on how you want it achieved, and then punish staff when they fail to achieve it, then staff will achieve the target – by any means necessary and…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Transformation and quality improvement is rarely sustained without changing management behaviours and management systems. John Toussaint writes about the challenges of adopting lean management systems in the NHS in “Is quality a strategy or an operation?”.…
