Podcast

Putting Passion on Your Dashboard

Understanding what customers value requires more than a marketing approach, says Dave Pericak, explaining how he learned about customer value from the Mustang owners who

by Lean Leaper

Article

Emergency Departments Use Lean Principles in an Effort to Perfect Patient Journeys

Sixty hospital emergency departments in Michigan formed a collaborative to apply the value-stream improvement methodology to cut the length of stay for patients.

by Chet Marchwinski

Video

Lean concepts that help you eliminate waste and create flow in your own work

Lean Enterprise Institute faculty member Dan Markovitz, an expert on improving personal performance, explains how the lean principles of 5S and visual management make you…

by Dan Markovitz

Article

Why A3s Won’t Work in My Organization (Part One)

Coach Eric Ethington shares obstacles you may be encountering as you implement A3 thinking--and suggests ways to proceed.

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Article

Expanding Our Perspective on Lean Management, Part 2: Lean has its Roots in Spirituality

To explore the idea that there may be other angles for understanding lean management than business or analytical perspectives, a group of lean management practitioners…

by Joanna McGuffey and Thomas Richert

Article

How Do You Know What Your Product or Service Needs to Be?

What does it take to know what your product or service needs to be? The obvious answer, it would seem, is whatever the customer wants.…

by Katrina Appell, PhD

Article

What does developing people mean?

Dear Gemba Coach,Are people tools? Should bosses use people? What does development mean? How should we think about it?

by Michael Ballé

Article

You Can't Know If You Don't Know

Recently LEI Chairman and CEO John Shook found an interesting blog by Dr. Helen Kales of the University of Michigan, musing on a powerful set…

by John Shook

Article

Where Lean Meets Innovation

"Many people see Lean purely as an improvement method, not a total enterprise solution or a new way of doing business," writes José Ferro. "In…

Article

Waste-Free Capitalism

In his first piece for The Lean Post, lean thought leader and LEI author Michael Ballé shares Toyota's lessons for society at large and calls…

by Michael Ballé

Article

An A3 Antidote to the Opiate Epidemic

Opiate use in America has been spiking at an alarming rate. Many healthcare organizations, such as the University of Michigan Medical School, are trying to…

by Ryan Howard

Article

Practicing Constructive Discontent At SBP

To become an organization of problem solvers, talking about problems couldn’t merely be something that we did, shares Zack Rosenburg of St. Bernard Project. It…

by Zack Rosenburg

Article

Anatomy of a Lean Leader (Introduction)

For 30 years, Jerry Bussell studied leadership while bringing lean practices to companies such as Medtronic and becoming a passionate, well-known advocate for lean. In this…

by Jerry Bussell

Article

Lean Thinking at 20: A Q&A with Jim Womack and Dan Jones

Twenty years ago Jim Womack and Dan Jones helped launch the lean movement as we know it today with their key book Lean Thinking. Yesterday…

by James (Jim) Womack, PhD and Dan Jones

Article

How We A3 at Goodyear

Just as lean is situational, A3s are situational too - companies like Goodyear have a variety of types of A3s that they use based on…

by Tedd Cowling, Norbert Majerus, Rob Schott and Damien Schreurs

Article

PDCA, Fitness Apps, and Using Social Media to Improve Our Health

"Health isn't about always being perfect," writes lean coach Tracey Richardson. "Just like in our organizations, we all have imperfect days. It’s how we change…

by Tracey Richardson

Article

Not Every Problem Is a “Nail” But Companies Typically Reach for the Same Old “Hammer”

Learn how you can avoid the frustrating, ineffective, but widespread “hammer-and-nail” problem-solving pitfall by recognizing four main problem types so you apply the right problem-solving…

by Art Smalley

Article

Do the Words You Use Create Clarity or Chaos?

"If words matter, shared understanding of words matters even more," writes Cindy Priddy. "The word coach reaches much further back than the image of a…

by Cindy Priddy

Article

Finding a Lean Cure that Respects the Health of Healthcare Workers

In his prognosis of the health care system, LEI CEO Eric Buehrens says we need to improve the work to remove waste and create value;…

by Eric Buehrens