Don’t do what many companies do and underestimate the time required for leaders—at all levels—to lead lean. If you try to lead others in continuous improvement before first budgeting and protecting leaders’ time to support the effort, you are destined to fail. Management attention must be focused and effective. So if something is killing your …
Freeing Up Leadership Capacity to Lead Lean | Episode 4 Read More »
In this episode you’ll learn: Why empowerment matters (0:39) Roadblock #1: Supervisors (3:02) Roadblock #2: Skills (5:03) Roadblock #3: Time (6:26) Roadblock #4: Tools (& Materials) (7:10) Roadblock #5: Physical Structures (8:28) Roadblock #6: Reward Systems (10:21) Roadblock #7: Information Systems (13:45)
Today we share about the idea of “Fix What Bugs You” from Paul Akers and 2 Second Lean. It is one of the simplest concepts to teach everyone about lean. It engages everyone every day and sets the bar so low that every contribution counts–no matter how small. If you want to create a culture …
I was recently thinking about the problem of empowering front-line employees in a regulated environment. It is extremely hard to do. There are layers of approvals and complex change control documentation that gets in the way. On top of that, there is usually a division of walls between manufacturing and the support departments they need …
5 Reasons To Move Engineering To The Production Floor (Tear Down The Walls!) Read More »
For lean to work in an organization it has to involve everyone every day. There may be other ways to create a lean culture, but this is one way we teach companies to practice lean. It’s because it works. And it’s because if you don’t involve everyone every day there are some very likely consequences.
Empowerment. Can you define it? It’s a word that is tossed around quite frequently, but what does it mean? Unless it is made practical, it won’t be very actionable. In that situation it might be better not to use the word at all for clarity’s sake. Thankfully, someone has made “empowerment” practical and clear—or at …
