Posts of the Year 2008

Following
the pattern of our good friend Ron Pereira at the Lean Six Sigma Academy, a number of us
are going “Best of 2008″ posts, in coordination with John Hunter
and the Curious Cat
blog.

Click here for John’s compilation
of the “Best of” Posts (he’s
updating as the others get their posts up).

Here are some of my favorite blogs that I follow regularly and
their best posts of 2008. I’m looking forward to what they have to
say in 2009.

DailyKaizen (Group Health
Cooperative)

• Why I Work in Healthcare: “The healthcare
  industry needs to start to pay attention to what other industries
  have already figured out. That the same reasons that we give as
  excuses on why processes cannot be standardized is the exact reason
  why we need to make them standard. The more complex a process the
  more important it is to standardize in order to bring it under
  control and then understand where it can be simplified.”?
• About Visual Management: “The
  visual system should always help the team that is using it improve
  their work. Whether it is a front line team or a management team
  the information provide by the system should drive improvement
  action or it is simply waste.”
• What Do I Do?: “I tried to describe
  to them that it is my job to support leaders in the improvement of
  the management processes of the organization and got back blank
  stares. I then talked about my coaching work with executives and
  when asked what I coach them on I often was stuck with saying
  “almost everything.” Once again blank stares.”
• Projects vs. Process Improvement:
  “As an organization we are still living with a slight hangover from
  our long history of Management by Objective (MBO).”

John Shook’s Management

• 
  The Most Frustrated Person in Your
  Company: “And, to my surprise and perhaps to yours,
  there is no one in the organization who is more frustrated than the
  CEO. Your CEO. Why? Because he can’t get done anything that
  he wants to get done!”
• 
  Survive to Make Money or Make
  Money to Survive?: “I think many of the GM people who
  spent time learning at NUMMI did in fact learn a lot — they got
  it, all right. But, “getting it” and knowing what to do
  with it back at GM to turn that monster around was a vastly
  different story. So, why didn’t GM learn? Or why didn’t
  they change based on what they learned about lean from NUMMI?”
• New Year 2009: “It is indeed my
  hope that lean will make all of our lives better, something that,
  we desperately need wherever we are in the world after a tumultuous
  2008. Here’s to a prosperous and happy — a better –
  2009.”

Elegant
Solutions (Matthew May)

• Letter to Apple: Think Lean, Not
  Different!: “You’re also quite good at creating
  something called MURI, or overload. Because you decided (in what
  I’m sure you considered a brilliant flash of genius) to
  launch the iPhone 3G on the same day in over 20 countries, you
  effectively made it impossible for customers to do what you wanted
  them to do in the first place: pick up a phone at the store and
  walk out being able to actually use it.
• 
  Toyota’s Value Innovation: The Art
  of Tension: “This is a great example of what I call
  dynamic tension, which is Toyota’s practice of pairing conflicting
  goals and demanding simultaneous resolution.”
• New or Different?: “Nearly
  everything we might think of as new and revolutionary is in reality
  quite evolutionary. For example, E-mail is a combination of two
  pre-existing applications, one written for a computer to send
  messages to itself, the other written to enable two computers to
  communicate. Or take the TiVo recipe: one part computer, one part
  TV Guide, one part video recorder—mix and stir.”
• 
  2009: Don’t Just Do
  Something: “As is natural and intuitive, I had been
  looking at what to do, rather than what to not do. But as soon as I
  shifted my perspective, the vaunted Toyota Production System became
  for me a study of what wasn’t there, and of how and what to
  stop doing.”

The Lean
Thinker

• 
  The Importance of Heijunka: “When you allow
  outside-induced variation to work its way through your system, you
  are putting potholes in the road. You are introducing sudden turns,
  sudden changes. Sometimes you are washing out entire bridges.”
• Mura, Muri (and Muda) in Healthcare:
  “For management, the question is a simple one: Is this task
  one which you would deliberately design into this person’s
  work process? If not, then question why it must be done at
  all. But you can’t just question it. That implies the person
  doing it is doing something wrong. She isn’t. She is doing
  exactly what must be done to do the job she was given. Question why
  it must be done so you can remove the necessity to do it.”
• 
  Management by Measurement vs. a Problem Solving Culture:
  “You get what you measure, but
  don’t be surprised if people are ingenious in destructive
  ways in how they get there. You can’t force a solution by
  adding even more metrics.”