FEATURE - Michael Ballé shares a few thoughts on leadership and respect for people, and tells us why lean management is the only way to make adaptive change a way of life.
COLUMN - For her latest column, Sari Torkkola describes the initial steps that must be taken to move towards becoming a lean CIO and warn us against some of the pitfalls along the way.
INTERVIEW – Dan Jones will be a keynote speaker at this year’s Lean IT Summit in Paris. In this interview, he gives us a sneak peek of what he is going to talk about.
COLUMN – In the first of a new series, Boaz Tamir explains how understanding the knowledge and development capabilities of our team can provide the foundations for more dynamic and safer innovation.
INTERVIEW - The historical city of Amersfoort in the Netherlands has introduced lean thinking and practice in local government to provide better and faster services to its citizens.
FEATURE - Every part of an organization can benefit from the adoption of lean principles, but what about accounting? Here are a few useful tips to efficiently close the books at the end of each month.
ARTICLE – Standardization is often ignored and misunderstood, but is as critical to a lean transformation as continuous improvement. This piece by our Polish team explains why standard work is not to be neglected.
CASE STUDY – Following one of the deadliest hurricanes in US history, an NGO started to use lean management principles to speed up the reconstruction of homes in the Louisiana city… and the results were impressive.
FEATURE – Menlo Innovations has proved there is a different, more "joyful" way of running a software development company – could those same lessons be applied to the healthcare industry?
FEATURE – Introducing initial assessments by senior doctors and bedside diagnostics to improve the efficiency of the Emergency Department: a lean healthcare experiment in England.
INTERVIEW - Are you a manager who needs to brush up on lean but has little time to do it? A new book by Cécile Roche comes to the rescue: A Little Lean Guide for the Use of Managers.
WOMACK'S YOKOTEN - Given the name of this column, it only makes sense to analyze the word yokoten. So, how can we effectively help others to apply what we learn at the gemba? What makes yokoten successful?
CASE STUDY - Össur is recognized as a leader in the fields of prosthetic, osteoarthritis and injury solutions, but how did lean management and a trial-and-error approach to improvement help it to stay competitive?
INTERVIEW - Like many other improvement methodologies, LeanUX shares a lot of principles with traditional lean. Yet, the two communities don’t know a lot about each other. We ask an expert to bridge the gap.
INTERVIEW – PL speaks to one of America's leading experts on the Toyota Production System about Toyota's unique approach to integrating product development with all other functions in the business.
FEATURE – A kaizen suggestion scheme has the ability to unlock the potential of lean change in our organizations, but too often our mistakes kill it before it even has a chance to take off and gain momentum.
FEATURE – No healthcare transformation can succeed without a system-wide approach to change. In this article, Dr. John Toussaint, offers his take on the issue, providing a guide for healthcare executives.
INTERVIEW – At the recent Lean Transformation Summit in New Orleans, we sat down with Richard Sheridan of Menlo Innovations to discuss the ground-breaking concept of joy in the workplace.
INTERVIEW – Overburdened and worn out? Visualizing your tasks using Personal Kanban can help you make sense of a busy schedule and reduce your stress, says Jim Benson.
WOMACK'S YOKOTEN - Every practitioner has encountered employee resistance to lean at some point. Here's a few tips on how to win over naysayers and perhaps even turn them into some of your biggest supporters.
ARTICLE - A-ha moments... we have all had one at least. In this personal account, the author reflects on what his own experience has taught him about changing our mindset and being stuck in our ways.
INTERVIEW – Lean for social good may sound new to many, but to the CEO of one of America’s largest food banks, the partnership between her organization and Toyota to defeat hunger in the Big Apple seems just natural.
CASE STUDY - How Spotify developed an alternative management system based on servant leadership, interaction-based learning and adaptability – changing the music industry along the way.
FEATURE - One big "introduction to lean" course isn't enough to teach people continuous improvement. Training, and therefore learning, must happen on a daily basis. Here's the Ten Commandments of lean training.
INTERVIEW - What do the United States Army’s Special Forces unit and Toyota have in common? To find out, we spoke to the Green Berets’ former Director of Training at the LEI summit in New Orleans.
ARTICLE - What is lean? We all like to think that we know. This personal story reminds us all of how elusive the methodology can be, and how determined a practitioner has to be to fully grasp it.
OPINION - If you have ever 5S-ed your daughter’s room or tried to bring one-piece flow to your grocery routine, this article on what lean management looks like in our personal lives is for you.
ARTICLE - Organizing for learning is critical to sustaining your kaizen efforts and improving your company. Choose the right managers, make sure they can self-develop and develop others, and help lean to take root.
FEATURE – In the Shatila camp south of Beirut, a self-help program is making a difference in the lives of Palestinian refugees, engaging them in rehabilitating their shelters.
INTERVIEW - Eric Ethington shares what he has learned about lean thinking implementations during his 30-year career holding positions at General Motors, Delphi and Textron.
FEATURE – Lean management forces us to look at our IT service management from a different perspective and helps us to ensure it really supports our organizational needs.
ARTICLE - Improving healthcare architecture means truly meeting patient requirements. This article reflects on the power of 3P design and looks at an implementation in the North East of England.
COLUMN - In the first installment of her new column, the CIO of Finnish defense company Patria shares her thoughts on what makes lean management so critical in the life of the leader of an IT department.
ARTICLE – You need to have a solid and complete process in place if you want your problems to be actually solved, and it is more than just developing an A3 or drawing an Ishikawa.
FEATURE – What makes a mentor-mentee relationship successful? This intimate account comes all of the way from a Tanzania healthcare organization, and proves how lean is fundamentally about “caring for people.”
FEATURE - An initial look into the impact of lean management principles on the growth of young organizations hopes to encourage further analysis into why and how lean startups succeed.
FEATURE - What do Toyota and Procter&Gamble have in common? A passion for developing people, a focus on customer satisfaction, and... enviable results that are sustained over time.
CASE STUDY – The Canadian province of Saskatchewan is running a bold experiment: applying lean management across all government. The driving force? A “compelling vision.”
RESEARCH - In the last 10 years lean has made its way in many hospitals and healthcare systems, often with impressive results. Professor Dan Jones looks back at the lessons learned throughout the decade.
FEATURE - Planet Lean launched exactly one year ago. Editor Roberto Priolo offers some reflections and a round-up of the most popular articles we have published to date.
COLUMN - As the lean community grows, experimenting with tools for self-organization like Open Space in order to build stronger lean networks.
NEWS - Our institutes in Turkey and Israel have collaborated closely for years. A few weeks ago, the President of Lean Institute Turkey flew to Tel Aviv to learn about Israeli agriculture.
ARTICLE - We always talk about going to the gemba, but we often don't understand what that entails and what changes it can bring to our companies. In this article, we hear about the experience of Thales.
CASE STUDY - The Italian branch of Tokheim services about 3,000 gas stations in the central and northern parts of Italy. The general manager shares the story of how lean thinking changed everything, for the better.
COLUMN - In political terms, is lean management more in line with conservative principles or progressive ideas? Michael Ballé reflects on a tough question.
OPINION – Lean Global Network institutes regularly collaborate on education. Josh Howell of Lean Enterprise Institute recently visited our Israeli affiliate to deliver a couple of workshops.
VIDEO INTERVIEW – Hierarchical organization, goodbye! Embracing servant leadership and a horizontal reporting structure, Spotify is redefining the idea of company.
INTERVIEW – Tom and Mary Poppendieck sit down with Roberto Priolo and discuss what makes product organizations successful today and where lean software development is headed.
COLUMN – Finance is a critical function within a firm. Yet, lean thinking seems to struggle to make progress in this field. Following a workshop with Nick Katko, the author of this article sees an opportunity.
FEATURE – Games can help you to engage people and communicate lean management principles. Here is a number of useful tips and suggestions on how to make training more… playful.
VIDEO INTERVIEW - Planet Lean speaks with Jeff Sutherland, one of the inventors of scrum software development, about the evolution of this Agile framework and its relationship with lean.
REVIEW - The Republic of Tatarstan officially endorses and funds the implementation of lean thinking in local organizations. Yalcin Ipbuken, President of Lean Institute Turkey, drops in for a visit.
FEATURE – The fifth article in the series Hazards on the road to lean analyzes the role of quality defects in helping to develop a lean management culture in your organization.
FEATURE - Mission creep, silos and a disengaged workforce are some of the negative effects of traditional management. Michael Ballé offers an alternative based on the respect for people principle of lean thinking.
OPINION – A trip to West Africa to deliver a lean workshop prompts Anton Grütter, CEO of Lean Institute Africa, to reflect on the meaning of the Andon cord.
OPINION - What does it take to start a lean implementation? People often hesitate, blaming lack of preparedness at different management levels. Truth is, all you need is two front line people who are committed.
FEATURE – René Aernoudts discusses how to use standardized work in an organization, providing a lowdown of the techniques available to the lean practitioner.
VIDEO INTERVIEW - At last month's UK Lean Summit, we sat down with Dan Jones and Jim Womack, founding fathers of lean thinking, to discuss the evolution, current state and future of the methodology.
VIDEO INTERVIEW - At the Lean IT Summit, we spoke with Amazon Web Services to understand what type of flexible and scalable IT infrastructure allows organizations to be innovative without breaking the bank.
CASE STUDY - A Turkish shipyard and engineering company has found that lean principles and practice are the only way to deliver unique, large construction projects efficiently and successfully.
NEWS - By offering tours of best-in-class companies and bespoke training to MBA students from Moscow State University's Business School, LGN's Turkish affiliate is helping to spread lean thinking in Russia.
FEATURE – An obeya room can be the cornerstone of a lean transformation, but developing a successful visual management environment is easier said than done. Nike’s Technology department shares a few tips.
FEATURE – Is your organization process-oriented or results-oriented? The fourth article of Hazards on the road to lean looks at what happens when you focus on the what, but not on the how.
VIDEO INTERVIEW - We spoke with Toyota Motor Europe's CIO at the Lean IT Summit about hoshin and IT, the application of the agile methodology, and the power of coaching.
ARTICLE – The Institut de Medicina Legal de Catalunya has learned that employee engagement and lean thinking can shake up even the stiffest of the public sector's working environments.
INTERVIEW – We speak with Sérgio Caracciolo of General Motors do Brasil about the carmaker’s approach to lean, its struggles, and its lessons learned.
ARTICLE - To operate successfully we need systems, but as we grow these often give us "big company disease." The solution is bringing leadership at work level to really guarantee customer satisfaction.
INTERVIEW - In our search for the perfect solution, we often seem to ignore the user's needs. Jeff Gothelf explains why this is nonsense and what lies at the heart of the Lean UX software development methodology.
NEWS - LEI partners with the Institute for Intrapreneurship to help established and startup companies to become more innovative using lean thinking and practices.
FEATURE - Britain’s National Audit Office looks at how well taxpayer money is spent, gaining invaluable insight into the use of lean management in central government.
FEATURE - London-based startup Elastera may represent the example of a company aspiring to be lean from the outset rather than trying to fix itself later through a transformation.
FEATURE – We can have the best processes in place and the best people on payroll, but if our goals are wrong our drive towards lean management won't be enough. Part 3 of Hazards on the road to lean.
FEATURE – Effectively applying just-in-time and achieving flow is impossible without leveling production first. Yet, most companies seem to think this is impossible because demand is so variable… but is it really?
RESEARCH - Standard work is not meant for senior leadership, but there are activities that CEOs can carry out systematically to support a lean management system, starting from problem solving.
ARTICLE - Are some national cultures better suited to implement lean thinking? This article, based on research on 45 Volvo factories, reflects on the role of local cultures in the rollout of a corporate lean program.
INTERVIEW - We caught up with LEI’s Senior Advisor, Jim Morgan after his plenary talk at the Lean Summit in São Paulo last month and got him to answer a few questions about product development and lean management.
INTERVIEW - Lean manufacturing principles, successful training programs and the involvement of management in daily continuous improvement are transforming Brazilian automotive supplier ZEN.
CASE STUDY – A unique approach to lean management and the involvement of CEO Mario Nardi helped Pietro Fiorentini, provider of solutions for natural gas distribution, become a model for lean companies in Italy.
ARTICLE - How can creativity and standards coexist? How do we move beyond silos? How do we fully understand the voice of the customer? Dan Jones reflects on three key questions for the lean movement.
EVENT REVIEW – This year LGN and Ansbach University’s CEPTM co-organized the first European edition of the Lean Educator Conference. Planet Lean attended the event.
INTERVIEW - Planet Lean speaks with Constantin May, Academic Director of the CEPTM institute at Germany’s Ansbach University, which organized the first Lean Educator Conference in Europe in co-operation with LGN.
FEATURE – In a transformation, should we spread responsibilities across the business or go for a centralized Lean Office? For their second piece, our Polish colleagues look at what they have learned on the field.
INTERVIEW – Brian Swain, Director of the Lean Construction Institute UK, has supported some of the largest construction projects in Britain, including London’s Olympic Village. Here he talks about the evolution of lean in the industry.
FEATURE - It took a Spanish clinical diagnostics instruments manufacturer the introduction of a new product to realize how an old-fashioned system and management style were preventing the company from thriving.
BOOK REVIEW – For our series of Q&As on recently published novel Lead With Respect, René Aernoudts shares what the key lessons learnt were for him.
NEWS - LGN's Polish affiliate is taking part in a European project to shed a light onto the development of meta products.
CASE STUDY - Three successful improvement projects at a hospital in Guangzhou are proving that lean healthcare in China is an opportunity that the sector cannot afford to miss.
OPINION – How many times, in the early stages of kaizen events, have you thought about giving up? Hang in there. As frustrating as they can be, they will also teach you a lot, says our Danish colleague.
FEATURE - In this new series, our Polish colleagues draw on their experience with customers and discuss the most common mistakes people make in their lean implementations.
ARTICLE - There is more to TWI than applications in our jobs. In this article, a creative mother shares the moving story of how she used Job Instructions to help her 5-year-old son with Asperger Syndrome.
BOOK REVIEW - In the first of a series of Q&As on the recently published novel Lead With Respect by Freddy and Michael Ballé, Dan Jones explains why this book is a must-read.
CASE STUDY - Through the involvement of front line staff, Hartmann’s production plant near Barcelona is paving the way for an expansion into different markets and inspiring the adoption of lean across the multinational.
FEATURE - Develop your people if you want to develop a better (lean management) system in your business. This is the key message of this article, which looks at the role of management in an organization and in society.
CASE STUDY - Addressing failure cost and introducing a new quoting process are only two of the ways in which Dutch construction company Dura Vermeer is successfully achieving a lean transformation.
RESEARCH - This interesting study, based on 44 Volvo plants and 200 Volvo interviewees, looks at how the implementation of lean thinking influences a plant’s performance over time.
INTERVIEW - The General Manager of a Delphi plant in Hungary talks about the lean transformation the site went through and the challenges automotive suppliers face in this day and age.
COLUMN - In the third article of our series, the CEO of a healthcare institution in Catalonia, Spain, discusses the implementation of lean as a mindset that has its foundations in continuous improvement.
VIDEO - Dan Jones was one of the keynote speakers at this year's Lean Summit in The Netherlands. Here's a 15-minute excerpt of his talk, with some great insights into the state of lean thinking.
NEWS - Back from his annual trip to Shanghai, Anton Grütter, CEO of the Lean Institute Africa, shares a few interesting insights into the Chinese culture.
INTERVIEW - What lies at the core of kaizen activity? How has the concept of kaizen evolved over time? Planet Lean’s editor Roberto Priolo discusses these and other topics with kaizen expert Mark Hamel.
