A Lean Idea a Minute
Todd Hudson's Maverick Thinking on Lean and Continuous Improvement
Don’t Be Scared Away From Lean
As you can imagine, I’m on a lot of mailing lists and social media groups about Lean and see it described and talked about in many ways. Recently, some of these have been really over the top and, quite frankly, do a disservice. Headlines like “Improvement Through...
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To Continuously Improve, Study Your Results
Woohoo! You’ve just launched a new training program and rolled it out to the organization. Time for high fives, right? Not so fast… If you’ve been learning about Lean, you know that all problem solving activities are guided by the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle, in...
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Lean Frees Improvement
Force field analysis is a fantastic change management tool. It also beautifully encapsulates the difference between Lean and traditional improvement approaches. A force field analysis diagram looks like this: Force field analysis is useful whenever you want to improve...
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Funnel Lean Savings in More Customer Value (NOT Lower Prices)
People focus too much on Lean as a way to reduce costs. Yes, that’s frequently one result, but Lean, at its core, is about creating more customer/patient value. Show ‘Em the LUV The perfect example is Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV). You’ll never see the word ‘Lean’ on...
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Lean is Hope (But Not Like This)
Lean is hope, but not in the sense of ‘I hope things get better.’ That’s hope as powerlessness. Lean is powerful. I got thinking about this after writing my post The Road to Lean, Part 2: Improvement Cultures. Different improvement approaches create different business...
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Cutting Out Waste (or Cutting Your Own Throat)?
In an earlier post, Small Wastes Get Big Quickly, my Lean Waste Calculator showed you how the minutes that employees are forced to waste to accomplish work quickly turn into thousands of hours for the organization as a whole. These equate to full-time employees NOT...
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Focus on Value (Sales), Not Bureaucracy (Returns)
My recent experience returning a pair of shoes to Nordstrom was a perfect example of a company understanding my blog post, Small Wastes Get BIG Quickly. Nordstrom doesn’t actually have a formal return policy. Here’s what they say on their website about returns and...
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The Great Training Robbery
I’d love to take credit for this provocative title, but, sadly, I can’t. This phrase was first used 45 years ago when a study showing little or no relationship between training and work performance was published. Most recently, it was used this past August for the...
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The Road to Lean, Part 2: Improvement Culture
In my post The Road to Lean, Part 1, I wrote about improving improvement and what it means to ‘do Lean.’ Specifically, we looked at improvement processes along three key dimensions, i.e., velocity, engagement and magnitude, and how the first two interacted. This time,...
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Small Wastes Get BIG Quickly
I’m going to show you some numbers. And you’re going to want to see them sitting down. No, really. They’re going to be hard to believe. You’re going to see how small wastes get BIG very quickly. Specifically, I’m going to show you how minutes of wasted time turns into...
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