Article

Ask Art: What Is the Biggest Cultural Change Barrier to Lean?

Art Byrne tackles the biggest cultural barrier to adopting lean practices in companies: the resistance of CEOs and senior management.

by Art Byrne

Article

The Real Lean Challenge: Levelling Production

Most lean practitioners focus primarily on the waste elimination aspect of Lean and ignore levelled production. In his second piece for the Post, Ian Glenday…

by Ian Glenday

Article

Chief Engineer: the Ultimate Working Together Leadership Role

Discover why the chief engineer role is the pinnacle of leadership in product development, demanding exceptional communication, vision, and the ability to inspire diverse teams…

by James Morgan, PhD

Article

The Age of Manipulating Customers is Over

In his latest column for the Post, Boaz Tamir explains how the business landscape has changed since consumers have become more and more conscious of…

by Boaz Tamir

Article

Passing the Baton

Jim Womack and John Shook reflect on passing the baton of leadership at the Lean Enterprise Institute

by James (Jim) Womack, PhD and John Shook

Article

Japanese Cult Invades Saskatchewan Government

Lean has become a political football in the normally congenial province of Saskatchewan. Read what John Shook has to say about the matter.

Article

Why is Flow Easy, and Quality Hard?

Dear Gemba Coach: My lean team has become proficient at teaching flow but it's not gaining traction when it comes to quality issues. Do you…

by Michael Ballé

Article

LPPD Under the Sea: Efficient Product Design with Subsea 2.0

In this excerpt from the new book Designing the Future, authors Jim Morgan and Jeff Liker share the case study of TechnipFMC's work on a…

by Jeffrey Liker and James Morgan, PhD

Article

What Matters When Giving — or Accepting — the Gift of Lean Thinking and Practice

Some “flavors” of lean are better than others. Here’s a description of one of the best — contrasted with examples of bad leadership practices.

by Josh Howell

Article

Public-Private Partnerships Lead To More Effective Government in WA

Since 2012, Washington state government has received more than 2,000 hours of volunteer advice, training, coaching, and/or facility tours from 132 lean experts representing 51…

by Darrell Damron

Article

Why ‘Framing’ is Crucial to Leadership and Encouraging Team Unity

A personal reflection of a company’s response to challenges brought on by Covid explores the fundamental thinking that drives how leaders lead — and explains…

by , Michael Ballé and Nicolas Chartier

Article

Mapping a Reading List to Lean

We humans want to see what is happening, understand how we and our colleagues best collaborate, solve problems, make good decisions, and have an insatiable…

by Jim Benson

Article

Two managers I relied on a lot are still fighting a two-year-old pull system and creating a lot of conflict on the team. Is this normal?

Dear Gemba Coach: I’m two years into establishing a pull system through my plant and two of my key managers are still fighting the system…

by Michael Ballé

Article

The Eight Wastes of Lean

Originally there were seven wastes identified by Taiichi Ohno for the Toyota Production System. As lean evolved into the rest of the enterprise and around…

by Jean Cunningham

Article

Stability Before Innovation

Given its foundational strengths of stable and robust product development, production, supplier development, and general management system, Toyota is well poised to deliver innovative solutions…

by James (Jim) Womack, PhD

Article

Why haven't lean tools changed our culture?

Dear Gemba Coach: I’m part of a team that has been tasked to implement lean tools across the company to drive continuous improvement actions, and…

by Michael Ballé

Article

Leaning Healthcare

Healthcare is the next great industry to begin the Lean journey. The existing model in which the hospital doctor acting as a skilled craftsperson effectively…

by Dan Jones

Article

New Book, Becoming the Change, Shows that Real Organizational Change Is Personal

Learn the cause of and cure for healthcare improvements that relapse to the old ways of working. Kim Barnes, Catalysis CEO, and John Toussaint, MD,…

Article

Constancy of Purpose

The first of Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points is "create constancy of purpose for continual improvement of products and service to society." When I…

by James (Jim) Womack, PhD

Article

Why Create Poka-yokes—and Why Disconnect Them?

I’m a manufacturing engineer and since I have started participating in kaizen workshops, I have noticed that production supervisors tend to disconnect some of the…

by Michael Ballé