Tag: Culture

Organizational Culture: Leadership, Behavior, and How Work Really Gets Done

Organizational culture isn’t what leaders say—it’s what people experience every day based on management behaviors, systems, and priorities. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on culture through a Lean lens, exploring how leadership decisions shape trust, psychological safety, learning, and performance. Many of these posts draw on lessons from Deming, Toyota, healthcare, and real organizations to show that culture is not a program to roll out, but an outcome leaders create—intentionally or not.

What Toyota’s 1992 Booklet Says About Stopping the Line, and What...

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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...

What Toyota Said About Their Own Production System in 1992

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Somewhere along the way in my career, someone handed me a copy of "The Toyota Production System," published by Toyota Motor Corporation in April...

Calling a Supervisor a “Process Coach” Doesn’t Mean the Job Really...

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Ford spends roughly $100,000 a year on each of its first-line production supervisors. The title on the job posting is "Process Coach" - language...

Did Ford’s Andon Cord Problem Ever Get Fixed? Help Me Find...

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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...

New Book Announcement: Psychological Safety for Lean Leaders — Vote on...

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I haven't said much about this here yet, so consider this the announcement. I'm writing a new book. It's a practical guide for Lean leaders,...

What Can a CI Director Do When Executives Undermine Psychological Safety?

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I get this question a lot. Some version of it comes up at nearly every conference Q&A, in coaching calls, and in emails from...

Anthropic’s Claude Code Leak: Why the Instinct to Fire Someone Is...

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Last week, Anthropic accidentally leaked nearly 2,000 internal source code files for Claude Code, their AI coding tool. Within hours, the code was copied...

Why Employees Don’t Speak Up — and the Subtle Reasons You...

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Every organization has a small number of people who will speak up no matter what. They'll raise the uncomfortable issue in the meeting. They'll...

Problem-Seeing Eyes Are Everywhere. Problem-Speaking Mouths Are Rare.

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TL;DR: Organizations invest in teaching people to see problems and solve problems -- but skip the middle step: making it safe and worthwhile to...

Eric Dickson on Building a Management System That Produced 200,000 Ideas...

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Dr. Eric Dickson spent the early part of his leadership career telling people what to do. It nearly cost him everything. What he built...

Leadership Overreaction: The Hidden Cause of Organizational Failure

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Tl;DR: Leaders unintentionally create fear by overreacting to variation, waste, and mistakes. That fear quietly kills improvement. This post connects the threads across my...

Before “Just Culture,” There Was NUMMI: Learning Instead of Blaming

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TL;DR: NUMMI proved in the 1980s what healthcare is still learning today: you can't punish your way to safety. Real improvement comes from mutual...
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