Twenty years ago this month, I recorded the first episode of Lean Blog Interviews. My guest was Norman Bodek, who spent decades studying Toyota and introducing American audiences to the work of people, including Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo. I’m…
Twenty years ago, on July 16, 2006, the Lean Blog Podcast began with a conversation with Norman Bodek. Norman was my friend and mentor–and the person who suggested that I start doing audio interviews in the first place. What began…
In July 2006, I pressed record on a conversation with Norm Bodek. The audio quality was poor. I had no idea what I was doing. Norman, who had spent decades going to Japan and had published Ohno and Shingo in…
Today’s post is a longer and annotated version of my acceptance speech at last week’s Shingo Conference awards gala. It’s a great honor that The Mistakes That Make Us has received the 2025 Shingo Publication Award. I’d like to use…
tl;dr: Shingo renamed “foolproofing” to poka-yoke (mistake-proofing) after the old term made a worker cry. The lesson holds: blame doesn’t prevent defects, and respecting people is what makes zero defects possible. I’m currently working on a Mistake Proofing class for…
2024 Preface: I’m re-posting this blog post from 2012 about Lean at Boeing. The WSJ headline emphasizes “speed up,” but that could be the fault of their editors not realizing that Lean means quality and flow go hand in hand.…
TL;DR: Shohei Ohtani’s extraordinary success as a two-way MLB star reflects more than talent–it’s a real-world example of the Harada Method, a goal-setting and self-reliance approach championed by the late Norman Bodek. This post revisits Ohtani’s story through a Lean…
I was incredibly saddened today to hear that Norman Bodek passed away yesterday in Japan, where he had recently moved with his wife, Noriko. Norman was 88. This was announced through an email from Norman’s company, PCS Press, and I…
TL;DR: Most organizations say continuous improvement matters, but treat it as optional–while performance reviews are non-negotiable. That choice reveals more about leadership priorities than any strategy statement. There’s a very well-known cartoon that you might have seen where a caveman…
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
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.
I've produced A LOT of content about Kaizen and continuous improvement over the past 11 years, including podcasts and webinars. Somebody asked me to build a "curriculum" and a sequence of podcasts and webinars for people to watch as a way of getting educated about this approach. So this post is an attempt at that...
