Tag: Baseball

You might remember my blog post from May about the Shohei Ohtani, a Japanese player for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (that's not a very "lean" team name, is it"). I suggested that Norman Bodek contact baseball or sports writers at publications like ESPN or The Wall Street Journal. The Journal wrote about Ohtani and Harada last week: How Shohei Ohtani Visualized His Baseball Success The Japanese two-way sensation turned to a personal-growth technique called the Harada Method to help him achieve his goals

If you're not a baseball fan, I apologize for a second baseball-themed post this week. Baseball has a lot of historical time-series data to work with and analyze. If you're not interested in "Process Behavior Charts" or similar methods, I guess I will apologize for this post again too. Next, I'll be apologizing for apologizing. But, I am at Dr. Wheeler's four-day workshop on "Understanding Statistical Process Control" as I blogged about on Monday. It's great to learn from Dr. Wheeler in person and I'll be sharing reflections on the class in a later post (and I'm posting a few things on LinkedIn along the way). In Chapter 1 of Understanding Variation, Dr. Wheeler points out how charts or graphs are far superior to tables or lists of numbers. He uses a baseball example:

I recently saw this headline: Baseball on pace for lowest batting average since 1972 Just because it's the lowest average in 48 years... it doesn't mean that this year's MLB-wide batting average is low in a way that's statistically meaningful.

Here is my latest article that I published on LinkedIn: Is the Reported Drop in Major League Baseball Attendance a "Signal" or "Noise" in the Data?

Back in 2014, I wrote an article for The Lean Post: "Standardization is a Countermeasure, Never the Goal" I'm a big fan of Taiichi Ohno's advice to "start from need." I cringe when I hear people say that we should standardize the way work is done "because Lean says so." There's no substitute for judgment in the grey areas related to standardized work. What should we standardize? For what purpose? How standardized should the work be? Baseball is struggling with questions like this... how standardized should the balls be... and for what purpose?

I first learned about an approach to personal development called "The Harada Method" when Norman Bodek co-authored a book with Takashi Harada: The Harada Method: The Spirit of Self-Reliance. Norman was a guest on my podcast in 2013 to talk about this... The Harada Method has been on mind again recently thanks to the success of Major League Baseball player Shohei Ohtani, from Japan.

As you might know, I have always enjoyed baseball and like blogging about ideas and statistics that come from the sport. I loved this recent article from The Wall Street Journal and there are parallels to Lean and being an effective change agent: "The Data Wonk Who Became a Coach"

Are minor league games taking longer? Well, yes and no, depending on the league. My next book, Measures of Success, is about the use of this Process Behavior Chart methodology in the workplace, as applied to our performance measures.  This post explores some data, how asking for more data can be more helpful, and how to use charts to evaluate a metric over time.

If you watched this year's World Series, you saw a lot of home runs. There were many dramatic home runs in late innings or...

Lean thinkers do their best to avoid blaming individuals for systemic problems. This lesson comes also from W. Edwards Deming who was deeply influential...

I saw this article over the holiday weekend: "Nats install bullpen seating for relievers." The Washington Nationals relief pitchers asked to have a set of...

Following up my post about not blaming a bartender, here's another look at learning to cast aside our old habit of blaming individuals... this...