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A Blog About Understanding TPS and Gaining Its Full Benefits, brought to you by "The Toast Guy"
A Better Class of Prisoner
I attended a very nice presentation recently by a person who has been leading the Lean charge for several years at a major medical center. As he reflected on key elements of his organization’s success, however, he made a statement that set off my crap detector: “It’s most important to start with good people,” he […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Mental Muri Migraine
October 9, 2012
It’s funny, hosting a bunch of Lean thinkers as we did at our recent Northeast region Shingo Prize Conference, that participants tend to be constantly on the lookout for small improvements, sometimes humorous ones like the one depicted below. Forgiving the poor photo exposure, can you see the inconsistency? Bathroom confusion. After a laughing conference […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Lead With Humiliation
October 4, 2012
Very early in my Lean adventure as a new VP of Operations, when the idea of listening to workers was still a little strange, I returned from a week vacation to find that two of my peer managers had teamed up to convince the company president that I had “turned over the asylum to the […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Learning To Share
September 18, 2012
There’s just one week left before our Northeast region Shingo Conference, so here are some final words about sharing, which is the theme for this year’s conference: As youngsters, sharing relates very specifically to things that are ours – toys, games, blankets, food, — the physical parts of our existence. But as adults, sharing is […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
High Level Ignorance
September 12, 2012
There are important concepts that we learn as children, initially through recitation, and later backfill with deeper meaning: things like the Pledge of Allegiance or the Ten Commandments. As adults, however, we often regress to the recitation level, invoking some semi-autonomous region in our brains to mouth the words without considering their meaning. In promoting […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Screwed
September 11, 2012
Our September 25-26 Northeast Region Shingo Conference is all about sharing: information, ideas, problems, plans – all of those things that can make the sum of the parts greater than the whole. So a story about the power of sharing ideas seems appropriate. As a new VP of Operations some years back, I inherited a […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Point of Abuse
September 6, 2012
I was in a factory recently that looked like a warehouse. The manager proudly described how they had eliminated their stockroom and brought all inventory to “point of use.” We had a conversation: Me: “Why did you do this?” Manager: “This is a best Lean practice.” Me: “Do you mean like ‘making the problem ugly?’ […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
October 25, 2012
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