Whether you are fixing a manufacturing or office value stream, lean is “about the creation of a problem solving and fast-learning culture,” said Jim Luckman, a faculty member at the nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute.  Luckman who has been a manufacturing plant manager, an R&D center manager, and head of a small startup company, recently discussed how to apply value-stream mapping in nonmanufacturing value streams with Business901 podcast host Joe Dager. One of the workshops Luckman teaches for LEI is on Value-Stream Mapping for the Office and Service

Many managers who are new to value-stream mapping don’t use it properly. They make two big mistakes — they collect too much data that is more precise than needed, according to LEI faculty member Drew Locher.

"Lean isn't about being cheap [but is about] being less wasteful and still doing things that are big," says Eric Ries, an entrepreneur whose projects include There Inc. and IMVU Inc., and a proponent of what he calls lean start-ups. The  lean startup philosophy aims to help new companies make speedier decisions by taking a more disciplined approach to testing products and ideas and using the resulting customer feedback. For instance, instead of building a software product with multiple features over months Ries advices continually deploying new software to test whether customers actually want a particular feature. (The Wall Street Journal)

See the LEI webinar with Eric Ries in the Webinar Library: http://www.lean.org/Events/WebinarHome.cfm