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What are the key traits I should look for in a potential Chief Engineer?
The chief engineer as practiced within lean product and process development (LPPD) is a countermeasure to problems that are both inherent to developing products and to the organizational design in which it is used. For example, the fundamental purpose of product development is to develop a product that customers will value, which is likely solving…
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Generating Multiple Alternatives is Not Necessarily Waste
for the customer in the product and your ability to produce it. Exploring multiple alternatives paired with quick learning enables faster time to market and more customer value. But this only happens if you evaluate the alternatives from the perspectives of the customer and manufacturing system. If you are evaluating alternatives from different perspectives that…
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Change Management: Is it Necessary?
For the organization and all individuals; the product of the dissatisfaction of the current situation, vision for what is possible, and first steps towards that vision has to be greater than the resistance to change. If any one of these aspects – dissatisfaction, vision, or first steps – does not exist, you are missing a…
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The Problems Inherent in Change – and What You Can Do about Them
What causes the inherent problems of resistance to change, management losing control, and political behavior to shape the power dynamics within the organization? Each of these problems is a response to uncertainty in the organization. Individuals resist change to remove the uncertainty of the unknown future. The formal management system seeks to maintain control to…
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What’s a good “small step” to start off my LPPD transformation?
Visual management (VM) is a great place to start your lean product and process development (LPPD) transformation, especially if you have prior experience using VM. A VM system works the same in LPPD as it would in manufacturing or any other environment. And if you don’t have experience with VM it is a great place…
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Lean Thinking On Purpose
What ways are we, as a lean community, contributing to society? In what ways should we be? What problems do we need to solve?
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Lean in Daily Life: Your respect for others will be your ticket to success.
Your respect for others will be your ticket to success. I usually don’t take fortune cookies seriously, but this one is different. It was very fitting that I was having lunch with “lean” colleagues when I read it as respect for people and continuous improvement are the two pillars of the Toyota Way: The Toyota Way 2001…
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Can lean / growth / learning / pdca approaches to change mitigate the inherent problems in change?
Can we learn from the typical problems that occur in change to approach change in a way that mitigates the problems? David Nadler¹ identifies three problems that are inherent in change and the resulting implications for change management: Each of the implications in the figure above can be viewed as a countermeasure to the associated…
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Lean in Daily Life: Why you are looking at snow
You may wonder (a few people have asked) why the header of this website (and the background of my computer) is a picture of snow. No, I wasn’t missing Winter all Summer. I still have non-fond memories of the record 90 inches we got last year and my corner lot with a bus stop across…
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Blogging on a Book: If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things You Would Do Differently: The Management Culture Matters
I love the simplicity in the emphasis of the impact of the management culture when using Deming’s ideas and philosophy: “Much has been written about the success of Deming’s ideas and philosophy in Japan. In the United States, however, it has not been nearly so successful, although it has been almost universally adopted. At first…