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.
In 1999, during his first year at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK), Darril Wilburn was given two jackets and a watch. The gifts celebrated how good everyone felt about the plant. The Camry was the best-selling passenger car in the…
When an organization gets described as having a culture of silence, the usual picture is of employees who won’t speak up. They saw the problem. They kept quiet. Afterward, somebody asks why nobody said anything. Sometimes that’s what happened. But…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guests for Episode #550 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi, co-authors of the new book Signals & Levers: Systems Thinking Tools to Unblock Software…
In July 2013, on a test drive in the United States, Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagen, noticed a paint imperfection on a Beetle. The paint was slightly thicker than the company standard. Less than a millimeter too thick, according…
Emily Swaney, VP of Operational Excellence at OhioHealth, explains how a Lean Promotion Office of 11 people supports a Lean management system for 35,000 associates. The approach relies on developing leaders as problem-solving coaches and on connecting daily huddles and…
I’m traveling internationally for ten days and I turned on one of the British news channels. There’s a major story about NHS England. First, the awful reality that a nurse would willfully kill babies in the NICU. Then, the second…
You came back with real energy. You’d seen how the work could be. You had notes, a few ideas, maybe a plan you’d already started sketching on the drive home. Then you walked back into the same building, run by…
My wife and I watched Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing last night. It’s Rory Kennedy’s follow-up to “Downfall,” and it’s built around former Boeing employees, including quality managers and inspectors, describing what they saw on the floor and what happened…
Somebody on the r/nursing subreddit asked what the worst medication error was that people had seen or heard about. Almost six hundred replies came in. I’ve read the whole thing, and there are a few ideas I want to come…
I’ve been pulling together a slightly updated edition of my eBook collecting the sports-related posts from this blog. The earliest post in it is from October 2005. The most recent is from January 2017. Going back through twelve years of…
Part of a six-part series on Toyota’s 1992 booklet, The Toyota Production System. See all six posts in order: What Toyota Didn’t Write Down. The 1992 Toyota booklet says surprisingly little about leadership. There’s a Kiichiro Toyoda quote about engineers…
