As a Lean practitioner, I found the Wall Street Journal article about Ryan DeLand, the 39-year-old leader of Whirlpool’s washing machine plant in Clyde, Ohio, to be fascinating. Here’s a free link: A Day in the Life of the 39-Year-Old…
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…
2024 Preface: I’m re-posting this blog post from 2012 about Lean at Boeing. The WSJ headline emphasizes “speed up,” but that could be the fault of their editors not realizing that Lean means quality and flow go hand in hand.…
You’re a retailing or manufacturing executive who hasn’t heard of MIT’s “Beer Game” management simulator? Then you’re probably swimming in a lot of excess inventory. If you’re an executive who also incorrectly thinks that “just in time” supply chains somehow…
Since I host a podcast about mistakes (“My Favorite Mistake“), this is a topic I think about a lot. I hear about people’s “favorite” professional mistakes and I reflect on my own. This headline naturally caught my eye last week:…
I love the theme of learning from mistakes. That’s why I started my latest podcast, “My Favorite Mistake.” Yesterday, I just released Episode 150. Who knew that so many people would be willing to talk about their mistakes and how…
As somebody who moved to Texas in 1999 (“I wasn’t born here, but I got here as quick as I could”), I love Texas barbecue. That means, in particular, the “Texas Trinity” of brisket, sausage, and ribs — although ribs…
The Taguchi Loss Function says that variation from target has a cost — and that cost grows non-linearly as you drift further from center. It’s a manufacturing concept. But Steph Curry’s shooting data illustrates it better than most textbook examples.…
tl;dr: The WSJ usually oversimplifies Lean, but this GE/Larry Culp article offers a surprisingly accurate look at flow, kaizen, and the culture behind real continuous improvement. It’s one of the few mainstream pieces that captures Lean as a leadership system–not…
This image — a huge container ship coming from a far-off land — does NOT represent the Lean and Toyota Production System notion of “Just in Time.” If you visit, for example, the Toyota factory in San Antonio, they have…
TL;DR: During the COVID-19 shutdown, most MLB teams cut minor leaguers to save money. A few teams didn’t — and that decision became a competitive advantage. This post shows how “respect for people,” a core Lean principle, can outperform short-term…
The other day, I stumbled across an old article that I remember, as it was published in the Wall Street Journal in 2004. The WSJ normally has a paywall, but this article is old enough that it’s free to the…
