How do you know when the leaders of a company understand Lean management? It is when they begin to treat their suppliers as valuable resources instead of entities to bargain with for lower prices. Executives start to see the key stakeholders – employees, suppliers, customers, investor, and communities – operate as an interdependent system, rather […]

Ashutosh Garg of “The Brand Called You” interviews me about Lean management. Have a look, I think you’ll enjoy it! 00:42 – About Dr. Bob Emiliani01:08 – Tell me about your journey in brief.02:06 – What made you become interested in the subject of lean management?03:01 – What would you describe as the core principles […]

Here is a very interesting article that describes how the department chair’s job has evolved over the years from something desirable, which many faculty aspired to, to a thankless and burdensome job that few faculty want: “For Chairs, the Seat’s Gotten Hotter: With new demands for fund raising and assessment, academe’s middle managers feel the pressure” […]

After decades of mismanaging costs and tuition pricing, university leaders have been forced by macroeconomic conditions to finally take action. These two articles on cost cutting (WSJ, 25 December 2013) and tuition pricing (NYT, 25 December 2013) outline the typical roads taken. Sadly, when it comes to tuition pricing, university leaders rely on expensive consultants to figure […]

As you may know, I have been collecting data for two teaching surveys: “45 Teaching Errors” and “The 10 Percent Problem.” Click on the image below to view a .pdf file presenting the interim data and analysis (special thanks to Kamna Tiwari for preparing the bar graphs). Key findings are summarized below (click on image […]

A little-noticed problem in Lean transformations is that senior managers keep using the language of conventional management, which inadvertently undercuts Lean efforts. So, not only does Lean require a different way of thinking and doing things, it also requires a different way of talking too. Leaders must abandon their verbal (as well as non-verbal) preconceptions. […]

Company culture is one of the most powerful factors in determining whether an organization is successful or not. In fact, the right company culture can improve productivity, employee engagement, retention, and recruiting. But what is company culture and why is it especially important in the manufacturing industry? What kind of impact does it have on […]

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 […]

My university is embarking on a large construction project for a new residence hall. That’s so 20th century… “Starting this month, the University will be initiating the construction of a new residence hall. This will be the largest, single residence hall in the [state university] system and the largest project in the history of [our […]

In Florida, a judge upheld the State Department of Education’s ruling that ties tenure and post-tenure review to student success. The article states (IHE, 27 December 2013): “The rules that have now been approved state that each district president, after consulting with faculty, should develop a system to evaluate faculty members, using ‘appropriate criteria to […]

Here’s an interesting blog post in the Chronicle of Higher Education “Why More Colleges Might Want to Measure What Regulation Costs Them” (6 January 2014). Why put effort into measuring the cost of regulation when the effort would be far better spent improving the processes used to comply with regulations? The Lean higher ed leader […]

Being a great Lean leader means to have an awareness of one’s biases. Normally, leaders possess many unconscious social biases, as described in the article “Bringing Hidden Biases Into the Light” (WSJ, 9 January 2014). The most prominent ones include age, race, gender, weight, sexuality, and disability to name a few. These inhibit an organization’s […]

Accreditation is supposed to result in graduates who can write and think well. Huh! Who knew? Finally, an article that explains what faculty and administrators have been missing all these years (“Pressure on Accreditation Is Cause for Concern, Speaker Warns,” CHE, 7 January 2014, subscription required). All along we thought that the purpose of accreditation […]

Professors commonly attribute the changes that have taken place in higher education over the past 20 or 30 years to “corporatization,” which means adopting the common market-based, for-profit corporate business model to non-profit higher education. A more accurate term would simply be “mismanagement.” The leaders of corporations do many smart things, but they also do […]

In a thought-provoking episode of the People Solve Problems Podcast, host Jamie Flinchbaugh has an engaging conversation with Jim Huntzinger, Founder and President of Lean Frontiers. Jim’s background is in manufacturing, engineering, and the lean enterprise. Jim’s understanding and experience provide listeners with a wealth of knowledge applicable to a wide range of professional fields. […]

This is the back story to the book Lean Is Not Mean. The leadership beliefs, behaviors, and competencies necessary to make Lean management a reality, is a field of inquiry that has fascinated me for 20 years. Beginning in 1994, I could see that some people in my management peer group were more successful than […]

Lean leaders at eight universities in the U.K. have created a new web site, Lean HE Hub, to advance Lean in higher education. While the focus has been primarily administrative processes, future focus will likely include academic processes as well. Check out the web site and join the LinkedIn HE group.

Is it time to get rid of value stream maps? The first-ever value stream map of a value stream mapping event reveals mountains of waste. The lead-time to achieve actual improvement has increased by 425 percent! Some are calling this a “Lean crisis.” Others are calling it a “Lean disaster.” Whatever the name, the real […]

Historically, public higher education has existed to serve the broad-based social, economic, and political needs of society. In the future, its purpose will likely be expanded to serve the specific needs of individual students at various points in their lives, on-demand and independent of campus location. That’s a huge change. It is a new teaching process for […]

I was recently a guest (for a second time) on a fun podcast called “The 30 Minute Hour” with hosts Eric Twiggs and Ted Fells. Eric was a guest on the “My Favorite Mistake” podcast with me, by the way. We were discussing my new book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of […]

The Eastern Academy of Management (EAM), an association of management educators in higher education, recently posted a call for papers for their May 2014 conference in Newport, RI. The first paragraph reads as follows: “Much of today’s management practice comes from the last century. We saw a surge of management innovation at the beginning of the […]

One of the lousy aspects of being a professor is answering the same questions from many students many times each semester, for many years. Questions, of course, need to be answered, and in a timely manner. However, the answer to many questions can be found in the syllabus or on the university’s web site. Why […]

In our experience working with organizations and teams globally, we’ve often talked to people who struggle to transfer their Scrum process into our platform. The most common objection is that iteration and flow-based processes can hardly co-exist. And while we’ve debunked this myth before, we wanted to be clearer on how the process works in […]

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching held a meeting on 23-24 January in Stanford, CA, called “Advanced Teaching – Improving Learning: 2014 Continuous Improvement Expert Convening.” The purpose of the meeting was to examine different approaches to researching K-12 education and improving the practice of teaching. I was invited to speak about the Lean […]

Organizations operating in competitive markets have never-ending challenges to develop new products, reduce costs, improve quality, and reduce lead-times. There are many other challenges as well, but these challenges are fundamental to survival. Yet, the favorite interview questions from top executives are more fluff than substance. It also shows that Lean thinking has not yet […]

For my Facebook fans you already know about this great feature. But for those of you that are not connected to A Lean Journey on Facebook or Twitter I post daily a feature I call Lean Tips.  It is meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledge tidbits about Lean to […]

Much of today’s problems in higher education can be attributed to one thing: leaders who have allowed colleges and universities to run on a time scale (months, weeks, days) that differs greatly from the actual time (hours, minutes, and seconds) the world runs on. The clock face illustration below succinctly expresses this problem. Historically, the large […]

Golf, like Lean, looks a lot easier to do than it really is. How hard can hitting a little ball be? How hard can improving processes be? While golf and Lean look easy to do, they are in fact difficult to do. They both require a lot of practice, and success is largely determined by […]

A growing number of construction firms are embracing the Lean methodology that emphasizes maximizing value for the customer while minimizing waste. The approach is simple and attractive in an industry where budgets, timeframes, and safety are all critical, but the project delivery is very different than traditional construction methods. This makes proper execution of the […]

Continuously moving assembly lines can move as slow as they need to, to fit the work on the length of the line. However, they cannot be as fast as you like. There are some limitations on the speed of the line due to the limitations of the walking speed of a human worker, and even […]

An obvious sign of mismanagement in an organization is leaders’ failure to confront fundamental cost problems in the enterprise and instead rely on quick fixes – often for decades. The growth of adjunct faculty (both part-time and full-time) and the below-living wages (for full-time adjuncts) is the most notable example in higher education. Exploitation of this […]

Today, I’m sharing a story of human error (mine). It’s related to the eBook publishing process and some thoughts I had about not repeating my mistake. I’ve published a few books independently through the Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) platform, namely Practicing Lean, Measures of Success, and my latest, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating […]

The second annual Lean Six Sigma for Higher Education Conference will be held this year at HAN University of Applied Sciences in Arnhem, The Netherlands, on 2-3 June 2014. This is your chance to meet people devoted to improving teaching and academic processes using Lean principles and practices. I will be presenting and giving a post-conference workshop on […]

Dear Business School Deans: The 20th century saw the development of two forms of management innovation: one for supply-driven, seller’s market-oriented batch-and-queue material and information processing – which is what all business schools teach – and one for demand-driven, buyers’ market-oriented flow – which business schools now need to teach across all courses. Batch-and-queue management practice […]