Leadership: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

In 2012, I spoke at the Lean HR Summit, which is one of the many excellent annual Summits delivered by Lean Frontiers. I had heard about[…]

Decision-Making Hierarchy

As many of you know, I’m a rabid fan of clarity (along with focus, discipline, and engagement, the foundational organizational behaviors that I address in[…]

Why Value Stream Mapping? Why Now?

Value Stream Mapping has been released. One of the most common interview questions I’ve been getting is: Why this book? Why now? The topic may seem a[…]

Lean Leadership: Listening & Humility

The holiday season is my favorite time of year for two reasons: the holidays themselves and business planning. Proper business planning requires significant reflection, an activity[…]

The Problem with Fuzzy Words

Those of you who’ve read my recent book, The Outstanding Organization, know that clarity, focus, discipline, and engagement are the four core behaviors required to[…]

Eiji Toyoda: A Consummate Leader (1913-2013)

The world lost one of its brightest business leaders this week, Eiji Toyoda. Fortunately, he left behind a legacy of leadership philosophies and practices that[…]

When “Corporate” Gets in the Way

One of the things that pains me the most is when I hear people saying they can’t make improvement because “Corporate” won’t allow it or[…]

Is Lean Dependent on Executive Support?

Unequivocally, YES. But…there’s more to the story. We don’t throw in the towel if we don’t have all of the preexisting conditions in place. Without[…]

Good Reading

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to implement pull in as many places as I can. Early last year I implemented it quite successfully[…]

Developing People: The Bane of “Training”

I frequently receive calls from prospective clients who seek “training” of some sort. The requests include Lean overviews, problem-solving workshops, value stream mapping training, and[…]

Lean vs. Six Sigma Debate (Sadly) Rages On

As many of you know, I’m a passionate advocate of Lean management practices and the power of Lean in transforming organizations. So I grow weary[…]

Lean is Chaos Reduction

It’s been interesting to see what people have picked up on as I’ve been promoting my new book, The Outstanding Organization. My original title was[…]

Blogging Away…

Earlier this week I learned that my blog posts weren’t being pushed to my subscribers as I thought they had. I was blogging away but[…]

Accountability or Chaos?

New clients nearly always list “greater accountability” on their short list of performance improvement goals. Leaders cite missed project deadlines, finger pointing, and “not my problem”[…]

What is Lean?

“What is Lean?” may seem a strange question to be asking 15 years after the approach gained recognition in manufacturing and began its progressive spread to other industries. But[…]