Happy Labor Day to all my American readers! For a lot of people, Labor Day means two things: a day off and the end of summer. However, Labor Day is a day set aside to pay tribute to working men and women and acknowledges the value and dignity of work and its role in American […]

In today’s fast-paced digital world, the right tools can make a significant difference in how efficiently we work. Luckily, there are a variety of free websites available that can help you streamline tasks, boost creativity, and make work life easier. Below are ten must-have websites that every professional should bookmark. PDF24 ToolsNeed to edit a […]

Employees are the lifeblood of an organization. How they interact within your company and with your customers directly correlates to a company’s success. Therefore, when organizations improve employee engagement, their business thrives. Employee engagement, or the enthusiasm and dedication employees feel toward their employer, is crucial in creating a positive and productive work environment. When […]

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 […]

This is a personal guided tour of regression techniques intended for manufacturing professionals involved with quality. Starting from “historical monuments” like simple linear regression and multiple regression, it goes through “mid-century modern” developments like logistic regression. It ends with newer constructions like bootstrapping, bagging, and MARS. It is limited in scope and depth, because a […]

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. Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation Global State of Operational Excellence It’s that time of […]

What is a leader’s role in creating a culture of continuous improvement? What is the real meaning of kaizen? What does “respect for people” really mean? And how can leaders be serious about what it takes to create a culture of excellence? On my fifth edition of the Japan Study Trip leadership development program – […]

I recently purchased an excellent book titled The Origin of Toyota’s Strength: Taiichi Ohno’s Kaizen Spirit. It is a commemorative book, first published in 1990 to honor the passing of Taiichi Ohno in 1990. The book consists of memorials, reprints of lectures, interviews, and articles published in years prior. It was assembled into book form by […]

Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #514 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Hugh Alley, an author and consultant. He divides his time between coaching senior operational leaders in continuous improvement, training front-line leaders in core supervisory skills, and designing industrial facilities.  An industrial engineer, he has […]

If you do Lean, you are copying Toyota and their production system — probably extremely poorly, but you are copying nonetheless. After all, Lean is a copy of TPS — a rather poor copy, but a copy nonetheless. And if the mantra has long been “don’t copy Toyota,” why was Lean created? Anyway, all of […]

Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Insights from Senior Leaders Do you and your leadership team feel burdened by solving all the problems that get in the way of achieving the results your organization needs? You’re not alone. This is the crux of the leadership challenge: transitioning from being the primary problem-solver to a transformational […]

In quality, regression serves to identify substitutes for true characteristics that are hard to observe and to find the root causes of technically challenging process problems. It is a major topic in data science, but oddly, the most extensive coverage I could find in the literature on quality is in Shewhart’s first book, from 1931! Later books, including Shewhart’s second, discuss […]

On LeanMag: Be Careful Before Standardizing Your Problem Solving You might be surprised to hear a lean advocate warning against a standardization. To be clear, I’m warning against both over-standardization and overly-rigid application of standardization. Standardization within problem solving is tremendously beneficial. First, it helps us train people on methods. Second, it reduces the friction […]

For about 50 years, many people have been very fond of Toyota’s management system, the Toyota Production System (inclusive of The Toyota Way). Yet for all of the love of this truly innovative system of management, there is surprisingly little evidence of true Just-in-Time production, jidoka, the daily practice of kaizen, “respect for people” and […]

By Pascal Dennis (bio) Big Company Disease has many causes. One of the most subtle is our inability to ‘wrap our arms around’ the PDCA cycle. Myriad improvement cycles begin – but they become fragmented: Group A develops the Plan, Group B deploys, Group C checks the Plan, and Group D adjusts it. I call […]

I recently purchased an excellent book titled The Origin of Toyota’s Strength: Taiichi Ohno’s Improvement Spirit. It is a commemorative book, first published in 1990 to commemorate the death of Taiichi Ohno in 1990. The book consists of reprints of interviews and articles published in years prior. It was assembled into book form by the editors […]

The Shainin System is a powerful methodology that has transformed problem-solving in the manufacturing sector. Developed by Dorian Shainin, this approach, often referred to as Statistical Engineering, focuses on identifying and eliminating the most significant source of variation within a process, known as the “Red X®.” Unlike other problem-solving methods, the Shainin System emphasizes simplicity, […]

Yet another year has passed, and AllAboutLean.com is now eleven years old! Every year I am surprised that I again managed to write and publish 52 blog posts, one for every week. And, by writing I mean actually writing, not just AI-generated text garbage. This is now the 579th post on this site! Since day […]

In this edition: Book 5 update; Heads up on some forthcoming changes; The Great Consolidation: What it means and how it went; Top posts Book 5 update For the uninitiated, book 5 is Wholehearted: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, which I hope to publish early next year. It’s “book 5” to distinguish […]

Six Sigma and Lean manufacturing are business methodologies focused on improving the quality of goods or services an organization produces by reducing variance in the production process. Leaders know that when a production process lacks the stability to create high-quality output consistently, it will continue producing defective products until someone intervenes and improves the process. […]

Being a business leader can be a joyful thing, but perhaps not for the reasons you think! The image below is a satirical and thus humorous look at The 15 Joys of Leadership that are associated with classical management — the traditional or “old way” of leading organizations that still remains widespread today. Senior leaders […]

  In the latest episode of the People Solve Problems podcast, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Jacob Stoller, an accomplished journalist, speaker, facilitator, and Shingo-Prize-winning author of The Lean CEO. Jacob, who is also the author of the upcoming book Productivity Reimagined, brings his extensive experience in demystifying complex business and technology topics to the forefront […]

Lean manufacturing is a process improvement methodology that started in the Japanese automotive manufacturing sector after World War II. Lean thinking aims to improve quality, speed production, and reduce costs by eliminating waste with continuous improvement driven by employees. Although the ideas were initially deployed in factories, the fundamental concepts apply to businesses of every […]

I recently purchased an excellent book titled Taiichi Ohno’s Records: Founder of the Toyota Production System written by Dr. Mitsumasa Kumazawa. The book was published in 2011 by Sankeisha Co., Ltd. Kumazawa-san, age 70, is a longtime professor (recently retired) of industrial engineering and production management. He had the good fortune of meeting Taiichi Ohno in 1977 […]

On IndustryWeek: Supply Chain Leaders Need a New Playbook, Focusing on Risk   For generations of supply chain leaders, the key words and phrases that dominated were optimization, rationalization, cost reduction, inventory reduction and so on. The basic performance of the supply chain was stable enough that it was often taken for granted.   Read […]

The VW plant in Emden is a well run plant, and among the best in the Volkswagen group. It is also producing only fully electric battery powered vehicles… which are not selling well. This leads to a lot of struggles and problems for the plant. Producing only one type of power train makes production more […]

Here’s a great opportunity for you to win TWO fantastic books–one for you and one for a young reader in your life! For the adults: You could win a signed copy of my latest book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation. This book dives into how embracing mistakes can […]

In the Lean methodology, we often talk about the importance of “going to the gemba” (or “genba“– the place where the real work happens. But it’s not enough to simply show up; the way leaders engage with employees on the frontlines matters just as much, if not more. Unfortunately, not every leader is equipped to […]

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 […]

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. As a Manitoban, I’m taking advantage of the narrow window of summer weather and […]

The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is a powerful metaphor for two important things: The first is the rare kind of workplace that people hope to someday work in, one that is exemplified by a “Lean transformation,” where the entire top leadership team is totally committed to “Continuous Improvement” and “Respect […]

While Lean/TPS is an unbeatable system to engage people and drive performance, its deployment is still limited outside of Toyota. This is a mystery we need to solve. — Bruce Hamilton Those words are from Bruce Hamilton’s blog post. titled: “Old Lean Dudes.” Here was my reply: I solved that mystery — from not one, but […]

The quote below is a wonderful example of “preference falsification,“ which is defined as: “The act of misrepresenting one’s genuine wants [and beliefs or interests] under perceived social pressures” (Source: Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification by Timur Kuran, p. 3). I praise K.D., whom I did not know prior to […]

The process you use to develop your strategic plan is as important as the plan itself. That’s why many organizations turn to the Hoshin Kanri approach, which focuses on creating a plan that takes into account both the daily management of the organization and the tactics necessary to reach those goals that will have the most significant […]