“Like Lean” – NY Jets Coach Rex Ryan
I heard a story on NPR last week profiling New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, “In Football And Life, Ryan Plays Like He Means It.” I was reminded of some Lean leadership concepts right away during the interview.
I heard a story on NPR last week profiling New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, “In Football And Life, Ryan Plays Like He Means It.” I was reminded of some Lean leadership concepts right away during the interview.
It’s Super Bowl week in the U.S., which is probably even obvious to many readers from outside of North America. As we watch the game, most fans will be focused mainly on the team outcome, as opposed to focusing on…

I apologize to those of you who aren’t fans of American football… but in keeping with the Super Bowl theme, I found this Vince Lombardi quote on my hotel key when I checked into a hotel (in Seattle, not Green…

Hello from the frozen tundra of North Texas. I wish the Packer fans hadn’t brought Green Bay weather with them. It’s not nearly as green as that picture of “Jerry World” (aka Cowboys Stadium) looks. Back in 2008, I blogged…

I got a question via Twitter yesterday from somebody who asked how to help production operators make the case to supervisors that their kaizen ideas should be implemented. My response was that the supervisors are the ones you need to…

There was a really good discussion and story on the ESPN program “Sunday NFL Countdown” today about individual player incentive payments — why are they necessary to motivate players and how do they distort the game in the last week…

I’m really excited that I’m going to be attending tomorrow’s Northwestern football game that’s being played at Wrigley Field, the legendary baseball stadium that opened in 1912. This will be the first college game played there since 1938 and the…
It’s time for a Lean Blog feature I haven’t done in a while…. “A Lean Guy Reads _______”. I’ve done this before with the WSJ, Fortune, and USA Today (click here for past editions). This time, it’s Tuesday’s USA Today…
Unlike Thursday’s joke, this is real. It’s a video posted by the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), featuring a full-time Lean professional, a “kaizen facilitator,” who is in the third year of coaching a youth (teenagers) hockey team in Ontario.…

TL;DR: The Olympic gold-medal puck was almost lost not because of bad intent, but because the system relied on people remembering under chaotic conditions. The real lesson is timeless: leaders must design processes that account for human fallibility instead of…
Saturday’s Wall Street Journal had an article (“11 Minutes of Action“) with analysis that said something my wife noticed a long time ago – there’s a lot of standing around during an NFL football game (or any football game, for…
Many of you know I’m an alum of Northwestern University, graduating just prior to the Rose Bowl season of 1995. I’m a huge NU football fan and I was exhausted from watching the Outback Bowl on New Years Day, the…