In his fascinating Industry Week article How American Workers Became Disengaged, Michael Collins paints an alarming picture of the steady erosion of worker pay over the past 50 years. Nobody can deny that this is a major factor in demotivating workers, and the subsequent decline in productivity. It gets worse, though. A more subtle aspect… read more.

Steve Brenneman of Aluminum Trailer Company has become widely known for taking lean to his entire enterprise, and the results are clearly visible in his plant and offices. Although ATC hosts frequent gemba walks, the message isn’t getting through to the CEOs. In this 5-minute clip, Steve and I compared notes on the question of… read more.

I love this review of The Lean CEO from leadership blogger Michael McKinney. It’s nice that it was positive, but great that he really got the essence of the book. “It is a holistic approach to management,” he said of Lean in the review, “It produces excellence because it is good leadership.” Exactly! Review of… read more.

Anybody who’s dealt with a government or large organization has run in to a stereotypical character – the manager who follows the rules with no apparent sensitivity to the circumstances regarding a given situation, or the consequences of his or her directives. We vilify these people as buffoons who are completely isolated from reality. What… read more.

Getting rid of unnecessary expenditures is one of those motherhood issues that makes great fodder for politicians. Who’s to argue? The problem is that these standard bearers for cutting waste tend to be people who have no idea of this entails. The big giveaway is that they tell us it’s easy – all you need… read more.

In his wonderful book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author Daniel Kahneman describes how the human mind jumps to conclusions and then hangs on to those conclusions for dear life. One of the phenomena is called WYSIATI, an acronym for What You See Is All There Is. The idea is that our… read more.

At a meeting with his commissioners, Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy recently cited step reduction as an example of how improvements were being made using lean. These tend to be pretty dramatic – 150 down to 50 is pretty typical. The fact that there are so many steps that can be eliminated shows that problems in… read more.

People tend to think of humility as a personality trait. We see the humble person as one who doesn’t boast, gives credit to others, and is self-critical. There is, however, another side to humility that’s not quite as obvious to people, yet it is absolutely essential for lean leaders. This is what I would call… read more.

Yesterday, my interview with Paul Akers went live on The American Innovator. We discussed my just-published book The Lean CEO and related topics. What great fun it was to be interviewed (actually, it was more of a conversation) by somebody who is as excited about lean as Paul is. Here’s the link to the show,… read more.

Everything is happening very quickly! The April 10 launch for The Lean CEO, it seems, has been moved forward, and the book is now available! I first learned this from Mark Graban, who has just posted his interview with me at leanblog.org. Mark is a great interviewer / interlocutor, and this interview turned into a… read more.