Tag: Mistakes
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: November 28, 2025
This edition of Ryan McCormack's Operational Excellence Mixtape highlights practical thinking on value creation, continuous improvement, and leadership in an AI-influenced world. From empowering...
Why Lean Leaders Should Be Thankful for Problems, Waste, and Mistakes
At the hospital on Monday, a chaplain shared a Thanksgiving poem on the theme of being grateful.
It struck a chord with me. As a Lean practitioner, it's easy to focus on the waste... the problems... the gaps. We think about what could be and the "ideal state." We strive for perfection and it's easy to lose site of what we have.
Unlearning Old Habits: What a Pickleball Mistake Taught Me About Feedback...
What Pickleball Taught Me About Kindness, Kaizen, and Culture
"Don't worry about your mistakes--you're learning."
That's what an instructor said during my first 1x1 lesson at...
Delta’s $70,000 Slide Mistake Shows Why “Human Error” Is Really a...
A Delta Air Lines flight attendant accidentally deployed an emergency slide, causing $70,000 in damage and delaying passengers for hours. It sounds like a...
How Great Leaders Prevent Mistakes and Learn from the Ones That...
I recently gave a virtual keynote for a global manufacturing company that's a customer of KaiNexus. Their leaders wanted to explore how to strengthen...
From Know-It-All to Learn-It-All: Leadership Lessons from Mistakes
Lessons from my book The Mistakes That Make Us, plus conversations with Phillip Cantrell and Damon Lembi
One of the central themes in my book, The...
Fred Noe of Jim Beam: Leadership Lessons on Mistakes, Innovation, and...
TL;DR: Fred Noe of Jim Beam offers powerful leadership lessons on learning from mistakes, small-batch experimentation, and long-term thinking. His approach shows how psychological...
Dale Lucht on Leadership Habits That Sustain Lean Transformations
In this episode of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast, Dale Lucht reflects on the leadership habits that separate short-lived Lean gains from lasting cultural...
Another Truck Got “Storrowed” — Why Warnings Aren’t Enough, and What...
For years, trucks have been crashing into low-clearance bridges along Boston's Storrow Drive, to the point where locals have coined the term "Storrowed." Even...
Five Years of My Favorite Mistake: Lean, Toyota, and the Human...
When I launched the My Favorite Mistake podcast in September 2020, I hoped to create space for leaders and innovators to share the moments...
Your Current Estimated Alarm Response Time Is… 13 Hours? A Lesson...
How long would you expect it to take for the police to respond to a burglar alarm at your home?
Why do I bring this...
Avoiding the Dunning-Kruger Trap in Lean: Lessons from Early Mistakes
The most dangerous moment in Lean is often right after your first belt class--when you think you've mastered it all.
You may have seen the...
