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.
In recent years, healthcare has been learning a lot of lessons from aviation — including checklists and “Crew Resource Management,” as written about in the excellent books The Checklist Manifesto and Why Hospitals Should Fly. Aviation has gotten much…
No. Toyota’s factories do not run a formal Six Sigma program, and they do not hand out belts. What Toyota does teach, broadly and without much ceremony, is basic quality control and statistical thinking, the kind of tools that predate…
Guest Columnist – Quality Digest Wow, this is pretty bad… allegedly about GE. Granted, any dysfunctional Lean company could end up with similar dynamics. So none of this is knock on Six Sigma… it’s about human nature and organizational dynamics.…
by Jamie Flinchbaugh, co-author, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean What’s the purpose of thinking about work as a value stream? Is it just a buzzword? It helps us identify how our activities connect and flow together in order to deliver…
GE’s CEO controls information worth billions – July 21, 2008 It’s always interesting to read about GE’s shift from a Six Sigma company to a Lean Six Sigma company. Their CIO, Gary Reiner, is responsible for their Lean Six Sigma…
Networks Plot Course – WSJ.com As the entertainment industry works to recover from the recently-ended writers’ strike, the WSJ article featured a quote from a division of General Electric: “[the networks] are hoping to maintain some of the cost-cutting benefits…
Technology Review: “You Don’t Understand Our Audience” It’s just one part of a very interesting article in the MIT magazine by John Hockenberry, a former reporter for NBC news. NBC (and NBC Universal) are a part of the General Electric…
An interview with P&G and GE CEOs Lafley and Immelt – December 11, 2006: I saw this yesterday and it jumped out at me, from a FORTUNE magazine interview with Proctor & Gamble’s CEO, A.G. Lafley and GE’s Jeff Immelt:…
NBC’s 30 Rock gave us another gem of workplace satire in its first season–this time blending reverence, absurdity, and a strange reference to fruit. In one scene, corporate executive Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin) delivers another over-the-top line of…
“Welch spreads business gospel from MIT pulpit” Jack Welch himself sure seems like the turkey with comments like this: “Don’t fall in love with your workers,” a business instructor tells a student who’s launching a small startup company. “If you’ve…
IndustryWeek : Driving Incremental Value Through Lean Six Sigma GE did so much to help popularize Six Sigma, will they do the same for Lean? As a lean guy, I hope GE is incredibly successful with their lean efforts –…
With Its Stock Still Lackluster, G.E. Confronts the Curse of the Conglomerate – New York Times Thanks to blog reader Steve for sending this my way. This article has some examples of how GE is using Lean to drive improvements…
