I recently had a conversation with someone who asked me to explain the concept of the Lean Enterprise. I quickly pitched my best elevator speech on the virtues of waste and value, to which he sarcastically responded, “Yeah. That works great…..if you want to turn everyone into robots.” It was then that I realized 2 [...]
Need something? Why don’t you have it already?
August 16, 2010 By 3 Comments
Whenever I hear someone ask a question that goes: “How do we get <insert person or group here> to do <something>?” I only have 1 answer: “Why aren’t they doing it already?” Seems so simple, and yet it is so powerful. It seems most people are looking for a solution without understanding the problem. Unfortunately, [...]
Best of MFP: Healing the workplace: This isn’t a pharmacy.
August 11, 2010 By 5 Comments
When trying to overcome a person, team, or even an entire company that is not performing up to snuff, there is almost always an effort to find a one-time, quick fix that solves the problem. At such time, consultants are brought in, or experienced internal personnel are reassigned, so that the problem can be dealt [...]
Solving Problems with Nostalgia
August 9, 2010 By 2 Comments
Magnetic Poetry: a problem statement A-ha!
July 27, 2010 By 2 Comments
Shuffling the pieces around creates new statements. Back in April of this year, when I started to develop this blog, I wrote a series of posts on Elephant Biting. The concept behind these posts was simple: You can’t take on an entire, big problem all at once. Those problems need to be handled little by [...]
Change Management and the 5S Framework
July 12, 2010 By 7 Comments
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about Rube Goldberg Leadership, in which I related management and leadership practices to the 7 Wastes concept found in Lean thinking. That proved to be a fairly popular post by my modest standards, so I thought I’d take another swing at relating some more intangible activities to [...]
Best of MFP: My Greatest Teachers: 5 Lessons for Everyone
July 8, 2010 By 5 Comments
The Problem is Knowing What the Problem is.
June 21, 2010 By 2 Comments
Often, when talking to managers about some challenge they are facing, I’ll get a brief history of what they are dealing with, including what was done by the last manger(s) and what inititaive(s) were tried in the past, with little or no success. Sometimes, they’ll even go on at length about exactly what was done, [...]
Positive Deviance: Transformation’s Fuel?
June 18, 2010 By 8 Comments
I Attended a presentation tonight from the Positive Deviance Initiative. According to their website: The Positive Deviance Initiative (PDI) is a network organization which is dedicated to amplifying the use of the Positive Deviance (PD) approach to enable communities worldwide to solve seemingly “intractable” problems which require behavioral and social change. While most of the [...]
Sightseeing Tourists: A Continuous Improvement Idea
June 7, 2010 By 1 Comment
We need more tourists at work. While the hospitality industry would certainly agree, that’s not what I have in mind. What we need are people to walk around, keep journals of what they see, and share their experiences with others. When trying to generate improvements, people often get stuck when trying to look at their [...]
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