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.
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…
The 1992 Toyota booklet says surprisingly little about leadership. There’s a Kiichiro Toyoda quote about engineers getting their hands dirty. There’s a brief sentence about executives visiting the workplace and acting on what they see. That’s about it. For a…
LinkedIn has a genre of infographic that’s very popular right now… that’s mostly right. You’ve perhaps seen them. A clean illustration of a Toyota assembly line, a worker reaching up for a cord, and a caption along the lines of:…
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…
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 andon cord. The booklet describes the mechanism with care. From the jidoka section: “The ‘fixed-position stop…
Somewhere along the way in my career, someone handed me a copy of “The Toyota Production System,” published by Toyota Motor Corporation in April 1992. I don’t remember who gave it to me. The document itself is unassuming – a…
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 borrowed directly from Lean thinking. The role description talks about Sounds great, right? Online job board…
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 plant were pulling the andon cord – the mechanism that lets any worker stop the line…
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, continuous improvement professionals, and anyone who’s ever wondered why their problem-solving training didn’t produce more…
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 CI practitioners. Sometimes it’s about an executive who blames people whenever something goes wrong. Sometimes it’s…
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 across the internet. A post sharing a link to it got 29 million views. Anthropic called…
