Lead Change Blog

NOVEMBER 27, 2018

Lean reflects the natural evolution of business and knowledge-based work: data-driven, yet practicing mindfulness in everyday production. At the team level, Lean prioritizes helping members pinpoint inefficiencies and work together to optimize results for the customer. Lean has long held a spot of great intrigue for us, so in 2016 we developed our first Lean Business Report based on survey responses from a number of Lean-practicing organizations across the globe.

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Lean Production Efficiency Tools Survey 205

First Friday Book Synopsis

AUGUST 13, 2011

The Toyota Way Jeffrey Liker McGraw-Hill (2003) To understand Toyota’s success, first understand its DNA I read this book when it was first published in 2004 and recently re-read it, curious to know how well Jeffrey Liker’s explanation of Toyota’s management principles and lean production values have held up.

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Lean Production Review Books Company 77

CEO Blog

JUNE 19, 2011

Liker, author of esteemed lean production manual The Toyota Way decided he should again focus on Toyota’s cultural efforts, but this time with a bit of a twist. Instead of firing employees like many other large firms were doing at the time, Toyota embraced its mantra of kaizen (Toyota’s firm philosophy of change/improvement for the better) and held company-wide training seminars (most impressively in factories it had stopped production in).

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Kaizen Lean Production Crisis Reputation 126

Strategy Driven

MAY 2, 2018

Lean thinking is all about doing more with less. Therefore, lean manufacturing is about reducing or eliminating waste across the board, from customer service and design to distribution and manufacturing. It is also commonly referred to as lean production. There are many benefits associated with lean manufacturing, as well as numerous challenges. The short-term and long-term benefits of lean manufacturing.

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Lean Manufacturing Short-term Lean Production Long-term 52

Harvard Business

MAY 26, 2016

It involves replacing traditional mass manufacturing with “lean manufacturing” principles. Over the last thirty years, the lean approach — developed by Japanese automakers — has permeated the manufacturing sector in developed countries, but is much less commonly used in the developing world. In addition to improved product quality and delivery times, the lean approach has been linked to improved terms of employment.

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Lean Manufacturing Apparel Compliance Outsourcing 30

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 8, 2013

By sheer happenstance, I had just gotten a copy of Gemba Walks , a collection of essays by James Womack , a co-author of the automotive classic The Machine That Changed The World and a pioneering importer of Toyota-inspired lean production insights and methodologies to America. The more deeply Jim's essays discussed the nature of supplier relationships, work-flow and value creation in lean enterprise, the keener the connection with YouTube's Space.

Disintermediation 8

Disintermediation Lean Production Incubator Automotive 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 22, 2015

This was the original purpose of forming corporations — to facilitate the production of products and services with the least amount of wasted time, materials, and labor. Many companies still compete this way and there continue to be successors to Taylorism, including business process reengineering and lean production. Many attributed Japan’s economic ascension after WWII to dramatically increasing the quality of its products.

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Six Sigma Taylorism Taylor Efficiency 10

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 29, 2013

He didn’t do it by making cars shoddier or offshoring production to low-wage countries. His secret was mass production in a “focused factory,” using interchangeable parts, specialization, and the assembly line. Ford shifted the auto industry from craft to mass production, and the Japanese later took it a step further to lean production. The same can be said of other procedures that might lend themselves to mass or lean production.

Offshoring 8

Offshoring Telecommunications Lean Production Constraint 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 20, 2014

Moreover, this isn’t always about coming up with new products and services. We tend to think of a shiny new product offering when we picture “strategic innovation,” but that’s too limited. And Toyota changed the auto industry forever with a systemic process innovation (the lean production system). How GE Applies Lean Startup Practices. Innovation isn’t always strategic, but strategy making sure as heck better be innovative.

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Lean Production Industry Business Model CEO 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 15, 2013

costs by using practices commonly associated with mass production and lean production. By focusing only on the most technical part of an operation, doctors at these hospitals have become incredibly productive — for example, performing up to five or six surgeries per hour instead of the one to two surgeries common in the U.S.

Lean Production 8

Lean Production Insurance Airlines Constraint 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 30, 2012

The dynamic is always the same, whether the idea in question is reengineering, six-sigma quality, or lean production systems: A genuinely original strategy is born in one company or industry, consultants discover the practice and turn it into a marketable commodity, executives in all sorts of other companies race to "buy" the product — and then they wonder why the technique didn't work nearly as well in their organization as it did in the place that created it in the first place.

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Airlines Six Sigma Lean Production Entrepreneur 13

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 23, 2012

Just as the "quality" and "lean production" movements of the 80s and 90s required quality to be designed — rather than inspected — in, innovators have got to demonstrate greater ingenuity and integrity around how they integrate real-world testing into their projects and processes. Just as with quality and lean, this turns out to be a cultural, organizational and technical challenge.

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Lean Production Transportation Compliance Agility 12

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 13, 2011

Many developing-country firms, even while trying to implement new techniques like Lean Management, ignore the fact that labor is different from other "inputs." in some of the other areas of management we examined, such as careful monitoring, lean production, and sensible targets. After a decade of painstaking research, we have concluded that American firms are on average the best managed in the world.

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Survey Benchmarking McKinsey Class 13

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 25, 2014

The most important way to mitigate risk is to become excellent at either engineering, product, selling, or operations and management. One option is to build expertise before founding a company: ask VCs and others in the startup community to recommend the most competent people they know — heads of engineering, sales, product, and operations — and look for a job working directly under them. “I’m so glad we read that case — I’m NEVER going to start a company.”.

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IPO Christensen Consensus Engineering 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 15, 2014

When is it possible to predict a product’s success? How you answer this question may be the most important factor in how you design your product development process — and, ultimately, in whether your business succeeds or fails. Is market performance predictable for a specific product or class of products? Outcomes will usually be much worse than predicted, and we will waste design, production, and distribution resources. Product development

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Black-Scholes CAPM Supply Chain Lean Production 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 10, 2015

More and more companies are adopting software and product development frameworks like Agile , Scrum , and Kanban — which promote quick, iterative, lean production — to deliver higher quality products, faster. If these methods can help teams get on the same page, streamline tasks, and reach collective goals more quickly, can they also help people be more productive in their personal lives? Collaboration Leading teams Productivity

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Agility Project White Paper Lean Production 12

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 12, 2012

A conglomerate, by definition, is a large corporation with diversified product lines , owned and run by the same management. Danaher, a smaller but very profitable conglomerate with a diverse range of manufacturing businesses, has a very different set of strengths; it applies its distinctive lean production system to a variety of product sectors, often through companies that it acquires and then transforms.

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Welch Diversity Hedge Chemicals 11

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 28, 2011

Japan is famous for its lean production systems and efficient supply chains. Large companies such as Toyota and Sony were forced to halt production not because of damage to their own factories, which were quickly checked and ready to go back online, but because they were dependent on a small number of parts from suppliers in Tohoku. I returned to Tokyo from Kansai late last week, burdened with about 20 liters of water.

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Supply Chain Long-term Lean Production System 12

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 9, 2012

The market rewards each of us according to our actual productive value, he insisted : "To each agent a distinguishable share in production, and to each a corresponding reward &38212; such is the natural law of distribution." If firms can, indeed, make such substitutions and thus shop for factors of production as if they were consumer products, then markets do determine the value of each worker and each piece of capital. Does production really work this way?

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Automotive Lean Production Marketing Crisis 9

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 17, 2013

They created and maintained a close connection to frontline staff — what Jim Womack , the expert in lean production and thinking, calls “going to gemba ” — Japanese for “the actual place.”. In August, Dr. Donald M. Berwick presented the report from the independent National Advisory Group on the Safety of Patients in England ( A Promise to Learn — A Commitment to Act: Improving the Safety of Patients in England ) to Prime Minister David Cameron in London.

Health Care 8

Health Care Welch Quality Lean Production 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 28, 2015

Technologies like 3-D printing, robotics, advanced motion controls, and new methods for continuous manufacturing hold great potential for improving how companies design and build products to better serve customers. Robotics is a good example: It’s obvious that it can increase productivity, but it takes some know-how to put robots to work. NUMMI) in California, did not deploy lean manufacturing across the company for decades despite the clear advantages.

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Depreciation Hypercompetition Christensen Lean Manufacturing 8

Harvard Business

MAY 2, 2016

They ignore the realities of how global manufacturing now works — how it has evolved into a complex network of interlinked factories that together build many of the products sold today. That is true at a high level — Section 304 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (and subsequent amendments) required every imported product to be “conspicuously and indelibly marked in English to indicate to the ultimate purchaser its country of origin, so we can see this plainly on store shelves.

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Cost Automotive Supply Chain Efficiency 30