Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is from Dr. Mark Jaben. I first met Mark in person at Cindy Jimmerson’s Lean Healthcare West conference in Montana last year. I’m happy to publish this new guest post to follow up his previous…
This one got stuck in the “stuff to blog about” pile for a few months, but HBR published a gem of an article called “How To Stop the Blame Game.” Dr. Deming always talked about how destructive blame could be,…
TL;DR: Samuel Culbert argues that performance reviews are subjective, political, and harmful to results. Instead of judging people once a year, leaders should coach continuously and take responsibility for system performance. Episode #117 is a conversation with Prof. Samuel A.…
When an organization sets a target for the number of kaizen ideas employees should submit, it usually gets exactly what it asked for — a number. What it doesn’t get is genuine improvement. The ideas come in to hit the…
As you might have heard, considering all of the Super Bowl media hype from here in North Texas, our weather has been pretty bad. Between different ice storms, we’ve been “snowed in” four separate days in the last two weeks,…
It’s Super Bowl week in the U.S., which is probably even obvious to many readers from outside of North America. As we watch the game, most fans will be focused mainly on the team outcome, as opposed to focusing on…
There was a really good discussion and story on the ESPN program “Sunday NFL Countdown” today about individual player incentive payments — why are they necessary to motivate players and how do they distort the game in the last week…
Dan Pink joins me to discuss his book Drive and the science behind what actually motivates people — ideas deeply aligned with Lean thinking and Deming. We explore why “if-then” rewards backfire for complex work, the dysfunctions of incentive schemes…
I’ve written occasionally about Lean efforts in government (see a list of posts here). There are formal Lean government efforts at varying levels of maturity and formality in a number of states, including Iowa, Jacksonville, Michigan, and Paul Akers’ LeanAmerica.org…
I saw a nice article by author Daniel Pink (most recently the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us) called “Think Tank: Fix the workplace, not the workers.” Without directly referencing Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Pink often…
I nearly drove off the road when I heard this NPR story yesterday: “Allowance Economics: Candy, Taxes And Potty Training.” Please take a listen or a read. In the piece, an Australia economics professor who is “an expert in incentives”…
Recently, I was able to visit VIBCO, a Lean manufacturing company in Rhode Island. Company President Karl Wadensten is the host of “The Lean Nation” radio show. It was my third time visiting the factory in the last six months,…
