Tag: Whiskey

I'm excited that Episode #11 of my new podcast "My Favorite Mistake" is now released! You can listen to it and learn more via my...

My wife recently had some work meetings in Louisville, Kentucky and she had a great idea... "Why don't you fly here on Thursday night...

I've owned the domain names LeanWhiskey.com and LeanWhisky.com for two years or so. That's not because I was going to get into the whiskey...

I'm excited that our sold-out "Symposium on Learning Organizations" group will be visiting Toyota's San Antonio plant on Wednesday. Later that day, we'll be touring the Garrison Brothers Distillery and, on Thursday, we are using their "barrel barn" as a venue for "Open Space" discussions, the Red Bead Experiment, and more. We have a group of 40 from many industries attending and we might run a similar event in a different location in the future. I've blogged about Garrison Brothers and my stint as a bottling line volunteer before... In that post, I shared pictures of me working to dip bottles of bourbon into a sealing wax. I was wearing a winter coat because it was February in Texas and there was a bit of snow and ice that week. When I was back there recently, I saw some additional improvements that seem like "Kaizen" to me. 

Thanks to posting about the trip on LinkedIn, I learned that Mike Bukowski is now working for Sazerac, the parent company of Buffalo Trace, in a process improvement role. Last year, Mike attended the site visit and class that Joe Swartz and I hosted at Franciscan St. Francis Health. Mike has embraced might call "lessons from Toyota," as taught to healthcare people, and is now training and coaching people who make some very fine bourbon, including Aaron Krentz, Processing Supervisor (at right).

Back on the podcast for the sixth time is my friend David Meier, a Lean / TPS consultant who is a former Toyota leader at their plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. As we mentioned in our April episode (#304), he's gotten into what's, perhaps, the most Kentucky of industries... distilling bourbon (and more) at Glenn's Creek Distillery. In this episode, there's a lot of bourbon talk, with some Lean concepts thrown in. If you share our interest in Lean and whiskey, then this might be your most favorite episode ever. Of course, if you don't have any interest in bourbon, you might well skip this one.

Last year, I wrote a blog post about the intersection of two things I like a lot: Kaizen and whiskey: "Why Kaizen is an...

My wife and I just got back from four days in Napa and Sonoma counties doing, ahem, "gemba walks" at a number of wineries,...