General Electric has played a significant role in the modern conversation about Lean, leadership, and operational excellence—especially through GE Aerospace and the leadership of Larry Culp. These posts examine how Lean thinking shows up (or fails to) inside a large, complex organization, with a focus on leadership behavior, safety, problem-solving, and culture.
Rather than treating Lean as a program or toolkit, this archive looks at GE through a systems lens: how leaders talk about improvement, how they respond to problems and mistakes, and whether daily management reinforces learning or blame. The emphasis is on what other organizations can realistically learn from GE’s successes, struggles, and evolution.
TL;DR: Lean at GE in Italy succeeds by empowering employees, avoiding blame, and building psychological safety–leading to faster problem solving, better results, and a healthier workplace culture. A Lean story caught my attention not just because of the impressive results–but…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! News, blogs, articles, resources, and links about creating value, continuous improvement, innovation, and leadership. Healthcare – Creating Value for…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients “We have a good people in a bad system”. Here’s an excellent interview with Dr. Marty Makary, author of “The Price We Pay”, on how to address the challenges of the US Healthcare system. Who knows…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients It’s been 20 years since To Err is Human, the seminal report from the Institute of Medicine, was released, estimating, to many people’s surprise, that almost 100,000 deaths per year in hospitals could be prevented. …
Here’s an article from Bloomberg BusinessWeek: GE’s Larry Culp Faces Ultimate CEO Test in Trying to Save a Once-Great Company Very early on, the article mentions Culp’s advocacy for “Toyota-style lean manufacturing.” Or is he pushing “Danaher-style lean manufacturing” and…
Jamie Flinchbaugh and I got a great response to the first episode of our new “Lean Whiskey” podcast. We’ve had a great time with this, and I’m happy that anybody is willing to listen :-) We’ve done our second episode,…
tl;dr: GE’s 1950s “Blue Books,” created by Peter Drucker for CEO Ralph Cordiner, promoted stewardship, shared responsibility to stakeholders, and mature leadership. These ideas contrast sharply with later, short-term, numbers-driven management–and raise the question of whether today’s GE still recognizes…
Jet lag, even well managed and planned for, meant I was awake early on a Sunday morning. Over breakfast, I read more about news from last week, that GE had fired their CEO John Flannery after 14 months and replaced him with a relatively new board member, Larry Culp.
Culp is GE's first outsider CEO hire in their 100+ year history. So who is this guy and why did they hire him?
Culp was CEO of Danaher, a company that's quite often held up as the best non-Toyota Lean company out there. And they're an American company. Danaher, through its Danaher Business System (DBS) approach, uses Lean as a business strategy in a way that's very different than Toyota. Danaher has acquired companies and brought DBS and Lean in as a way to turn around and improve those businesses.
In this 2015 conversation, John Dyer reflects on his career at General Electric — including attending Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s four-day seminar and a smaller follow-on course — and what happened when he took Deming’s 14 Points back to GE…
To the left is a young baby me. I don’t think I was thinking about Dr. Deming as a baby, but thankfully my parents had a lot of intrinsic motivation to take care of me! One of the many things…
Following up my earlier post about the “Patriot Way…” During her halftime extravaganza (video), Katy Perry had a silver strap around her wrist, attached to the microphone. It reminded me of the Nintendo Wii strap that helps prevent throwing the controller (Update:…
Thanks to my friend and former Toyota employee Karthik Chandramouli for noticing this commercial on TV. In the 60-second piece, GE highlights how their advisors helped a manufacturing company double efficiency by using Lean methods and by asking “the important…
