Lean Blog

TL;DR: Burger King, T-Mobile, and Domino's have all built ad campaigns around the same confession: our product was bad, but it's better now. The marketing is interesting. The leadership lesson is better. In each case, the harsh verdict comes from a customer rather than the brand's own scorecard, and the apology only works because the company fixed the underlying problem first...

You finally found the perfect hire. The one who did this exact job, at a company just like yours, for six years. No training required. You felt the relief of it. Someone who already knows the work, who can start Monday and contribute by Friday. Six months later, you notice something. They still speak about problems, and solve them, the way their old company did. They reach fo...

Picking up the thread from the previous post on Toyota's April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” This one's about the line-stop rope or andon cord. The booklet describes the mechanism with care. From the jidoka section: “The ‘fixed-position stop system' is a classic example of jidoka. In that system, a worker anywhere on the assembly line who notices an abnorma...

A lunch, a hand gesture, and the question most Lean implementations are answering backwards. The gesture is the whole thing. The late Hajime Ohba held his hands out in front of him, palms down, one higher than the other. “All the other consultants and managers implement solutions down on the people doing the work. What they don't understand is the work always changes in unpre...

Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better. The real risk of easy AI answers isn't that the tools surpass us, but that we lose the slow, uncertain exploration that makes ...