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.

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...

Safety First Isn’t a Slogan: What GE Aerospace’s CEO Gets Right...

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TL;DR: GE Aerospace's annual report treats safety not as a compliance topic or a communications slogan, but as a core leadership responsibility. By putting...

Why “Speak-Up Culture” Might Be Better Language Than Psychological Safety

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TL;DR: People speak up at work only when it feels safe and worth it. Psychological safety reduces fear--but without effective problem solving, speaking up...

Ray Zinn on Learning from Mistakes — and Why “Fail Fast,...

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Ray Zinn argues that effective leadership isn't about failing fast, but about learning from mistakes by acknowledging them quickly, fixing them early, and not...

Inside the 1987 NUMMI Management Practices Executive Summary: Why Leadership Mattered...

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TL;DR: In 1987, GM accurately documented why NUMMI worked--and it wasn't tools, techniques, or discipline. This internal report reveals a management system built on...

Creating Value Without Command-and-Control — John Rizzo on Empowering People

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In this episode of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast, John Rizzo explains how organizations create lasting value by empowering people instead of relying on...

Gemba Walks, Daily Improvement, and the Leadership Behaviors That Make Kaizen...

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At our 2016 Kaizen Live! event at Franciscan St. Francis Health, Mischelle McMillin shared practical, honest, and refreshingly human insights on Gemba Walks that...

“Toyota Culture” 20 Years Later: Why Liker’s Lessons Still Matter in...

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TL;DR Twenty years later, Jeffrey Liker's message still applies: Lean fails when it's treated as a set of tools instead of a leadership system....

Five NUMMI Tour Lessons That Still Define Lean Thinking

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A 2005 tour of the NUMMI plant revealed lessons about Lean that had little to do with tools and everything to do with leadership,...

How Don Kieffer Applies Toyota Thinking to Modern Knowledge Work

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Why do so many Lean efforts fail in offices, engineering, and executive work? In this episode, Don Kieffer explains why copying Toyota's rituals misses...
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