Article
How Can Lean Take Root in a Crappy Culture?
Dear Gemba Coach: I've done a lot of working with lean, and recently started my first coaching/consulting gig. And while I'd love to help by…
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What Should Lean Mean to Us?
Brent Wahba offers lean beginners a few tips for how to be most impactful. "If you are working on how to begin your situational Lean…
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Why implement lean when it fails so often?
Dear Gemba Coach: Is it true that lean often fails? What’s the point then?
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Do you use Japanese terms in your lean transformation or purposely avoid them? Why?
Recently we asked our community "Do you use Japanese terms in your lean transformation or purposely avoid them? Why?" Below is a list of all…
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Toothbrush Plant Reverses Decay in Competitiveness
Faced with competition from plants in China and Mexico, Oral-B's Iowa City plant was slated for closure. But the rapid introduction of a lean system,…
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The Lean Manager
For many companies, the most important problem is not doing lean; it is becoming lean. How can they advance beyond realizing isolated gains from deploying lean tools, to fundamentally changing how…
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Podcast
People-First Leadership: A Conversation Between Jim Morgan and Alan Mulally
Leading through challenging times means enhancing your work process and always looking to improve people's lives. Putting people first is just one of the many…
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Lean Change Is Organizational and Personal
"Lean management is less about providing the right answers than asking the right questions and exploring those questions by engaging others in experiments to learn…
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The Trouble with Lean Experts
Dear Gemba Coach: I run a Lean Promotion Office (LPO) and my team mostly conducts kaizen events across the company. We are usually seen as successful…
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Why Lean Management Requires Humble Hubris
A lean coach reflects on the mindset and related behaviors that are the standardized work of “being the change you wish to see.”
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Standardized Work in Machine-Intensive Processes
Dear Gemba Coach,Most lean literature and case studies to date focus on assembly type manufacturing which utilizes very people-intensive operations. This is not the case…
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Ask Art: Where Will the Biggest Resistance to Lean Come From?
Resistance to Lean will come from every part of your organization, senior management included, says Lean veteran Art Byrne. Knowing where the biggest resistance will…
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Active Caring
Caring about others, caring about quality, caring about professionalism. When you care, continuous improvement and action come naturally. Turner Construction CEO Peter Davoren says that…
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Why 'Yes Chef!' Is No Longer the Answer
In order to meet the changing demands of today's restaurants, chefs must learn to evolve from old-school methods of the "brigade system" and learn to…
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We mapped a process, improved it, but six months later, performance is as bad as it was before – what are we missing?
Dear Gemba Coach: We’ve drawn the value-stream map of one of our complex production processes (17 steps), identified the key bottlenecks and improved the process.…
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There are so many lean management principles to know and tools to master at the start – is there an easier way to begin?
Dear Gemba Coach: Isn’t there an easier way to start lean? For a beginner, it seems like such a mountain to climb – all these…
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We meet daily to examine a new customer complaint. What do we do next?
Dear Gemba Coach: We’re a start-up and have taken your advice: we now have a customer wall and we meet daily to look into a…
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Why We Believe Lean is Worth Our Unwavering Commitment
Lean provides a powerful alternative to short-term enterprise driven solely by the goal of maximizing profits while externalizing human and environmental costs, argues these leading…
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Ask Art: Why Does Setup Time Reduction Matter So Much?
Setup reduction is a necessary step to go from traditional management to lean--or said another way, from batch to flow and from push to pull.…
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What To Do When Executives Think Continuous Improvement Smells Fishy
Top executives are smart, but they don't always see the value of continuous improvement efforts. And continuous improvement professionals don't always communicate that value well…
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