Lean Blog

Somewhere along the way in my career, someone handed me a copy of “The Toyota Production System,” published by Toyota Motor Corporation in April 1992. I don't remember who gave it to me. The document itself is unassuming – a horizontal-format booklet from Toyota's International Public Affairs Division, written for outside audiences who wanted to understand what Toyota was act...

Why do so many quality programs fall apart the moment the firefighter walks out the door? In this conversation, Chad Diggs talks about his new book, Below the Surface, and what it takes to build quality systems that outlast the people who built them. Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #544 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast ...

The public conversation about AI is dominated by cheerleaders and doomers. Both camps are loud. Neither is very useful when you're trying to decide whether to use AI on a Monday morning. Most working Lean people I talk to sit somewhere quieter than either camp. They've tried things. They've kept some, dropped others. They have a short list of things they won't use AI for at a...

“Challengers” A college friend of mine sent me a photo from Oslo recently. He'd spotted a display about IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad and his “challengers” just outside the Nobel Peace Prize Center and the National Museum, and sent the translation along with it. The line that grabbed me first: “Don't break the rules, just stretch them a bit.” That's apparently how Kamprad descr...

Mike Stoecklein recalls a story secondhand. It was, he thinks, at one of the last four-day seminars W. Edwards Deming ever gave. Deming was frail by then. Someone later told Mike that when the seminar got to the Red Bead Experiment, Deming stood up slowly in front of the executives in the room and said something like: “Young Jerry Stoecklein, nine years old, he understands th...