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.
TL;DR: GM’s “Speak Up for Safety” program targets the wrong problem. Employees spoke up about the ignition switch for more than a decade. Leaders didn’t listen. The problem at GM wasn’t that employees didn’t speak up. An engineer flagged the…
tl;dr: This post features a rare 1990 video of Steve Jobs describing continuous improvement in ways that closely echo Lean and Kaizen principles. He challenges “we’ve always done it this way,” stresses that people are smart and should own improvement,…
Following up on yesterday’s post that talked about “the old GM” putting cost ahead of quality, I sometimes get flashbacks to my days working for General Motors. I once slammed a greasy connecting rod down on my manager’s desk at GM.…
I wrote an article for LinkedIn yesterday about the recent GM ignition problem controversy and recall. I commented mainly on the video put out by new CEO Mary Barra (which I encourage you to watch). As a former GM employee,…
It’s easy for an organization to say they are “doing Lean” or they have “started a Lean transformation.” They might hire a consultant or put out a press release. Maybe there’s an optimistic (but premature) news article about how the…
It’s been fun attending the annual Lean Transformation Summit (produced by LEI). Today is Day 2. I took some notes from Day 1 and Tom Ehrenfeld has been “live blogging” it a bit on the LEI site. Tom also took…
Retired Navy F-14 pilot and airline captain Steve “Monty” Montague spends his non-flying days helping hospitals adopt the safety culture that made commercial aviation the safest way to travel. In this episode, we talk about why standardized work frees people…
Yesterday, I had a chance to visit Menlo Innovations, a software company in Ann Arbor, MI. I was happy to not only meet their CEO (and my recent podcast guest) Rich Sheridan, but to meet team members and get a…
I had a chance to go back to the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas (TMMTX) plant in south San Antonio last week with a group of executive education students at Trinity University. I first visited the plant back in 2010 and…
Mark’s note: Christina Kach is back with a new post, this time a review of what should probably be considered a “Lean classic.” Come back tomorrow for my first podcast interview with one of the co-authors, Dan Jones. You can…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is an excerpt from the book Remarkable by Toby LaVigne. Toby’s bio can be found at the bottom of this post. In this chapter from the book, Toby writes about a good friend of mine and…
After posting some raw notes yesterday on John Shook’s talk, I wrote a piece for the LEI’s “Lean Post” site that appears today. In the article, I took a stab at summarizing some key Lean Startup concepts for those who…
