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.
How often do you hear executives blaming employees, including frontline workers, for different problems or poor performance? I don’t think that’s a good look when leaders do that. Leaders are responsible for the system, especially senior leaders. Even though they…
tl;dr: Toyota’s culture treats problems as opportunities for learning–not failures to hide. Lessons from Toyota leaders show how kaizen, psychological safety, and trust enable frontline problem-solving, sustainable improvement, and long-term success. I have been really enjoying this book, released in…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #502 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is DeWayne Allen, an executive, speaker, and workshop facilitator. DeWayne is a results-driven executive with over 20 years of experience,…
Embracing Imperfections and Learning from Mistakes: A Leadership Insight from the 2022 AME Annual Conference… In a riveting conversation between Larry Culp (at the time, CEO of GE and now CEO of GE Aerospace) and my good friend Katie Anderson…
I recently spoke and facilitated at a health system’s quarterly leadership forum event on the topic of “Psychological Safety as a Pre-Condition for Continuous Improvement.” Learn more about the topic. It was very well received, and I’m very passionate about…
TL;DR: Boeing’s 737 MAX failures weren’t caused by frontline workers–they were the predictable result of leadership choices that prioritized schedule over safety and ignored core Lean principles. Lean failed at Boeing because executives waved it off, not because the ideas…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #501 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Marcia Daszko, a speaker, workshop facilitator, and consultant. For more than 25 years, she has passionately been speaking, consulting,…
Recently, I’ve heard an idea a few times that I’d like to share and discuss in this post. As I’m writing this, I can’t remember who to cite. That’s my mistake. I’ll happily correct the post if I remember or…
It’s 9 p.m. in an operating room, just before the last procedure of a long day that had been full of delays. A nurse sees that the surgeon is about to make an incision without first stopping for the expected…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make…
As I recently shared on LinkedIn, I really appreciated the annual shareholder letter that was published and shared by Larry Culp, who has been CEO of General Electric for just over five years now (the first-ever outsider CEO in their…
tl;dr: The Boeing 737 MAX incident wasn’t caused by careless workers. It was the predictable result of weak systems, rushed production, poor mistake-proofing, and a culture that discourages speaking up. Blaming individuals prevents learning; fixing systems prevents recurrence. As we…