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.
Here’s a short video that I made that talks through the chapters and main points of my new book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation. Update: The book is now a Shingo Publication Award…
tl;dr: Firing someone after a mistake doesn’t prevent recurrence. The next person will make the same error unless you improve the process with mistake-proofing, clear standards, and better system design. This post shares a story I heard at the Michigan…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #482 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Gemma Jones. Gemma is an Improvement Coach, Trainer, and Visual Facilitator, based in the UK and working globally. Gemma…
tl;dr: In this post, Mark challenges the common notion that speaking up in an organization is solely a matter of individual character or courage. He argues that the willingness to voice concerns or ideas is largely influenced by the culture…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #481 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is George Saiz. As a coach, writer, and speaker, George Saiz actively promotes enterprise excellence through a people-centric culture to…
I hosted and participated in a live online panel discussion on Thursday as part of the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Webinar series. The recording can be found at the link below and on YouTube. Scroll down also for the preview discussion…
TL;DR: PDSA only works when people feel safe to surface problems, test ideas, and admit when something didn’t work. PDSA is supposed to be the engine of learning in Lean organizations. It’s how teams test ideas, discover what actually works,…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… 10 Most Clicked Links…
Below is some material that I wrote, but didn’t use, in my book The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation. Maybe it was a mistake to cut it. But the material wasn’t really related to…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… Operational Excellence, Improvement, and…
In this Lean Blog Interviews episode, Zeynep Ton explains why good jobs are not a perk or policy–but a system. We discuss her book The Case for Good Jobs, the Good Jobs System, and how dignity, fair pay, slack, and…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… Operational Excellence, Improvement, and…
