Leadership isn’t about titles, charisma, or quick decisions—it’s about creating systems where people can do their best work and continuously improve. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on leadership through a Lean lens, drawing on ideas from Deming, Toyota, healthcare, and real-world management practice. The common theme: leaders shape culture, influence behavior, and own the systems that produce results—for better or worse.
The 1992 Toyota booklet says surprisingly little about leadership. There’s a Kiichiro Toyoda quote about engineers getting their hands dirty. There’s a brief sentence about executives visiting the workplace and acting on what they see. That’s about it. For a…
The Sign on the Wall Was a Confession Two staff members are repositioning a patient by hand. The lift assist that’s supposed to be used for this — the equipment the hospital bought specifically so nobody does it this way…
Picture your best week as a leader. Every meeting ran on time. Every status update was green. You walked the floor and people smiled and told you things were going great. Your open-door policy was working beautifully, because employees kept…
Gary Peterson spent almost 40 years helping O.C. Tanner build a continuous improvement culture, work that earned the company the Shingo Prize in 1999. He joins me to talk about psychological safety, autonomy, leading change from the middle, and the…
TL;DR: Burger King, T-Mobile, and Domino’s have all built ad campaigns around the same confession: our product was bad, but it’s better now. The marketing is interesting. The leadership lesson is better. In each case, the harsh verdict comes from…
Picking up the thread from the previous post on Toyota’s April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” This one’s about the line-stop rope or andon cord. The booklet describes the mechanism with care. From the jidoka section: “The ‘fixed-position stop…
A lunch, a hand gesture, and the question most Lean implementations are answering backwards. The gesture is the whole thing. The late Hajime Oba held his hands out in front of him, palms down, one higher than the other. “All…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
There’s a hospital somewhere this quarter presenting a labor efficiency story to its board. A unit that used to have a dedicated charge nurse now has a “Working Charge Nurse” – someone who takes patients and runs the unit. The…
Scott Burgmeyer, founder and CEO of Become More Group, has spent more than 30 years watching smart people make avoidable decisions — not because they lack intelligence, but because they stopped thinking. In this episode of Lean Blog Interviews, we…
I haven’t said much about this here yet, so consider this the announcement. I’m writing a new book. It’s a practical guide for Lean leaders, continuous improvement professionals, and anyone who’s ever wondered why their problem-solving training didn’t produce more…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
