Accreditation for higher education is an overly difficult and complex process in need of simplification and improvement via kaizen. The people who prepare for accreditation site visits – faculty and administrators – mistakenly equate hours worked and volume of output as a proxy for high quality of work, as do the reviewers. Everyone accepts the […]

In my travels to companies working to transition from conventional management to Lean management, I find that visual controls are greatly underutilized. If we’re trying to learn new ways of thinking and doing things, then we need help to remind us to think and do things differently. A lot of visual controls are needed, but […]

I’ll be on vacation for the next several weeks taking a much needed break. Americans leave too many vacation days on the table — Consider these statistics:   Although Americans have fewer vacation days than people in any other country, they have been taking less and less vacation over the last 15 years.  Fifty-five percent of Americans did not use […]

My application of Lean principles and practices to teaching has led to an outcome that I did not anticipate. Much like the Maytag repairman, the absence of chronic problems in teaching, academic advising, grading, etc., makes for a bit of a lonely existence. You still have problems, but they are acute (once in a while) […]

A tribute to my mother-in-law, Loretta B., a most wonderful woman (28 July 1935 to 2 May 2014). Loretta’s sayings have always been interesting to me because they reflect various aspects of Lean thinking and doing. Here are a few examples: “Eat one lasagna, make another.” A 15-pound lasagna is itself the kanban card that signals […]

I hope you enjoyed the highlights from Day 1 of the of the Shingijutsu-Kaizen Conference. Here are highlights from Day 2, held on 2 May 2014 in Windsor, Connecticut: Mr. John Cosentino, Ironwood Partners, LLC Like Art Byrne, John Cosentino met Mr. Nakao at the TPS training seminar held in Hartford, Connecticut, in May 1988, when […]

I had the great pleasure of attending the first Shingijutsu-Kaizen Conference held on 1-2 May 2014 in Windsor, Connecticut. The theme of the conference was “Reflecting on the First 26 Years, Evolving to the Next 25 and Beyond Succeeded by Next Generation!” Shingijutsu, as you may know, was founded in 1987 at the request of Taiichi […]

Leaders in general, and college leaders in particular, more often disappoint than they impress. My view is informed by the difference between conventional leadership and Lean leadership. The beliefs, behaviors, and competencies of the two types of leaders are in stark contrast with one another – the former being far less capable than the latter. […]

TODAY marks the 17th birthday (or is it an anniversary?) of my Lean Blog Interviews podcast (known in the early days as the LeanBlog Podcast). It’s an awkward name and part of me wishes I had chosen something with more pizzaz, but it’s straightforward… it’s an interview podcast that was born from my blog. The […]

Throughout the history of progressive management, Lean tools have been valued by leaders far more than they have valued the human relations practices that must accompany the tools. This is because tool are seen as a form of capital; a type of useful equipment that unambiguously helps improve productivity. In contrast, most leaders view the human […]

This is the back story to the book Lean University. Higher education has been in trouble for some time now. Why is that? In part, it is because university leaders have long thought universities are different from other types of organizations  – so much so, that they can manage poorly for decades and largely ignore the environment […]

This is the back story to the book Lean Teaching. Upon completing my Ph.D. in Engineering at Brown University, I decided to get a job in industry rather than an academic position at a university. I felt it was important to gain significant real-world work experience that I thought would be essential in case I returned […]

Do students have a right to know the results of student course evaluation surveys? I think they do, and we should give them as much information as possible. Making student course evaluation data publicly available is controversial, for reasons ranging from misleading student feedback, to privacy laws (pertaining HR records), to reducing academic rigor, and […]

An aspect of Lean management that is poorly understood by both management practitioners and academics is the evolution of the “Respect for People” principle in progressive (Lean) management, beginning with the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor. I have written much about this critically important principle over the last 15 years, but my graduate student, Mark Gajewski, […]

Why are so few organizations competent when it comes to the “Respect for People” principle? Let’s consider this question from the perspective of how organizations are designed. Nearly all organizations exist as a hierarchy, in the model of a military hierarchy. The CEO or president is at the top and the worker is at the bottom. Implicit […]

The work that professors do is exactly the same as anyone else. It consists of three components: Value-added work Non-value-added but necessary work Waste (activities that add cost but do not add value) We also have to contend with unevenness and unreasonableness, just as everyone else does. People who do not think of their work […]

As a historian of progressive management, I like to look at the past to see if it can tell us anything useful about the future. More often than not I find disturbing parallels which suggest that humans make the same mistakes when they are in similar circumstances. History may not exactly repeat itself, but it […]

The state university system that I am a part of has recently engaged a consultant to “assist with the development of a plan to transform the state university and community college system.” As a result, there are periodic Board of Regents updates that include publicly available presentations highlighting various activities. It is a fascinating opportunity […]

Visual controls have been an important part of the university courses that I have taught for nearly 15 years. I require students to create a visual control near the end of most courses based solely on the reading, lectures, homework assignments, and discussion from the course. The learning objective is to help them apply what […]

Let us focus on what Generative AI does generate, speaking exclusively from personal experience. Generative AI is the generic term for systems like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, DALL-E, or MidJourney, that generate text, images, or other media in response to prompts. All sorts of news sources report it as a revolutionary technology poised to dramatically change […]

Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation One-Piece Flow isn’t always the best solution Lean practitioners have often relied on the […]

In a previous blog post, Lean Leader’s Visual Control, I shared with you a couple of visual controls that I created to help leaders learn new ways of thinking and doing things. In this post, I’d like to share with you a few excellent examples of visual controls created by students in my courses as part of their normal […]

Episode 40: “New Riff, a new book, and exploring lessons from examples of pivots”  In Episode 40, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh get back together after their in-person visit where they enjoyed the origins of this podcast: talking about lean stuff while enjoying some whiskey. We get to celebrate the launch of Mark’s new book, […]

Listen: In Episode 40, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh get back together after their in-person visit, where they enjoyed the origins of this podcast: talking about lean stuff while enjoying some whiskey. We get to celebrate the launch of Mark’s new book, The Mistakes That Make Us, as well as Jamie’s new podcast titled People […]

My career in industry was limited at times by my unwillingness to do as I was told. Despite that, I earned high marks and was rated as a “high potential” employee throughout my career. Here is one of the things that I had difficulty with: stupid metrics. Click to view presentation. Specifically, metrics that were […]

Business process improvement (BPI) is the systematic approach of analyzing, optimizing, and enhancing existing business processes to achieve better efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance. It involves identifying areas for improvement, implementing changes, and monitoring the outcomes to drive positive results within an organization. The goal of business process management is to streamline workflows, eliminate inefficiencies, […]

The essay, “The False Promise of ‘Practical’ Education” (CHE, 19 May 2014, subscription required), by Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, delivers a wonderful defense of liberal arts education. In past blog posts, I too have defended liberal arts education (here and here), though not as eloquently. Yet, there is a limitation in […]

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on […]

“No” is a bad word for leaders to say. It broadcasts to people, “Don’t try new things,” “Don’t experiment with different ways to correct the problem,” and “Don’t take action when problems arise.” It shut’s down people’s minds and disables the uniquely human challenge to make things better through thinking and creativity. Unfortunately, organizations are hierarchies […]

A professor asked the following question: “One of the items that stands out from your writing is the need for leadership. Given the (at best) lukewarm reception so far for Lean in higher education, the question is: What are we doing wrong? Why are we failing to engage colleagues and administrators? What different strategies could […]

My son, Michael, started playing trombone in 4th grade, played in high school band, and in the first two years of college. In his sophomore year of high school, Mike took up the electric bass. While his trombone playing was good, it was his bass playing that amazed me. He developed a passion for that sound […]

Organizations implement process improvement initiatives, using various process improvement tools, to drive operational excellence, enhance customer value, achieve cost savings, and remain competitive in their respective industries. By continuously evaluating and improving their business processes, companies can continuously evaluate and improve their processes to adapt to changing market dynamics, deliver superior products or services, and […]

Instead of sitting in your office and expecting different results from your team, go and see where the real work happens. In today’s blog, we list the seven steps you should follow to perform an effective Gemba walk. But first, let’s get into what a Gemba walk is. What is a Gemba Walk? Gemba is […]

In the article “More than MOOCs” (Academe, May-June 2014), author Jonathan Rees makes a good case that academic freedom must include not only what professors teach, but how they teach. The combination of knowledge of the content and pedagogy appropriate to the content represents skilled educational labor, which risks being displaced by MOOcs and the […]