Lean Enterprise Institute

From the beginning of our coaching and co-learning relationship at Starbucks, we were traveling new lean territory. It was about two decades ago when Scott (at the time the VP of Strategy at the coffee shop chain) sought counsel from John (an independent consultant prior to his leadership role at LEI), during which t...

Every lean person knows PDCA. Plan, Do, Check, Act. It is one of the most familiar disciplines in our field.

This discipline for improvements also increasingly applies to a different kind of work: the cognitive, knowledge work we do at a desk (thinking, analyzing, writing, planning, problem solving), now done together with an AI. This is augmentation, not automatio...

I met Orry Fiume, who died on May 5 at age 83, on my first visit to the Wiremold Company in West Hartford, Connecticut, in the spring of 1994. I was searching for lean success stories to feature in my and Dan Jones’s book, Lean Thinking, and Wiremold h...

Creating highly crafted products that delight customers comes from understanding critical product attributes and delivering them with precision. It is a fundamental part of Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD) and a good example of designing the value stream. And while this attention to detail is needed all along the value stream, it begins in design and engineering. O...

In 1987, Nobel laureate Robert Solow made an observation that still echoes: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”1 

Companies had spent a decade pouring money into person...