Nearly two million improvement proposals in a single year. Ninety-seven percent implemented. That doesn't sound like the suggestion-box model most organizations know. It sounds like something else. The number comes from Toyota's April 1992 publicatio...
The target printed on the chart was zero percent. The red line had never been near zero. Not in the nine months posted on the wall, and probably not in any month before them. It sat between 6.43% and 6.98%. Every month, someone updated it. And every...
Picture your best week as a leader. Every meeting ran on time. Every status update was green. You walked the floor and people smiled and told you things were going great. Your open-door policy was working beautifully, because employees kept walking t...
Back in 2009, I pointed an early iPhone at my TV and recorded a Fox News segment about ThedaCare's collaborative care model. The footage is grainy. You can see the glare on the screen and hear the room around me. I'd forgotten I still had it until re...
102 seconds versus 300 seconds. That's the comparison the 1992 booklet uses to make the case for one-piece flow. Three employees on an assembly line. Three processing steps. Same work, same number of people, same total processing time. The only diffe...
To save herself the hassle of mixing a pen name with her real name, publishing strategist Wiebke Tasch opened two Amazon accounts — a move that quietly violated Amazon's rules. One morning she woke up to an email saying both accounts were gone, her b...
If you've read much of my work, you know I keep circling the same question: why do smart, capable people hold back what they know? Sometimes they stay quiet because they tried speaking up once and got burned. Sometimes a softer force wears them down...
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 Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :Three years ago, my book "The Mistakes That Make Us" came out. Around the same time, Elisabeth Swan published "Picture Yourself a Leader." Two diff...
The Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :I haven't mentioned this here yet, but I'm writing a new book. It's a practical guide for Lean leaders on psychological safety -- why so many impro...
The Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :There's a limit to what you can learn about the Toyota Production System from books, courses, and conferences. I say that as someone who writes the...
The Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :I'm giving away 10 free quarters of the Lean Hospitals AI Coach. Here's how to get one.If you own a copy of Lean Hospitals -- any edition, any lang...
The Mistakes That Make Us is a recipient of the Shingo Publication Award from the Shingo Institute!Hi :Here's something odd about AI coaching tools: they're all trained to be maximally helpful, which means the moment you ask a question, they give you...
