This week’s guest is Jeff Kaas, President of Kaas Tailored and Lead Consultant at Truth Bit Pull Consulting. Jeff described how he discovered kaizen, how it changed his company, and more. An MP3 version of this episode is available for download here. In this episode you’ll learn: Jeff’s background (1:59)
Category: Lean
The words of the fourth century Taoist philosopher Zhuanzi led to a previous article about Lean thinking and respect for humanity. Another piece of writing attributed to him is titled Geng Sang Chu. It tells the story of a disciple of Lao Tzu and offers a few Lean lessons. Geng Sang
Respect for people is one of the two core pillars of lean, if not the most important. We talk and write about it a lot, and it is a significant component of Gemba Academy’s online lean training programs. When respect for people is combined with the other pillar, continuous improvement,
This week’s guest is actually Ron himself. Our own Steve Kane came on the show to ask Ron about the concept of root sin, and how it applies to both business and continuous improvement. An MP3 version of this episode is available for download here. In this episode you’ll learn:
What we call continuous improvement (CI) is in fact unattainable. Something that is continuous is uninterrupted and never rests. Even if we dedicated 100% of our time to CI activities, which is impractical since our daily work would not get done, the improvements we make would be in fits and
We’ve recently had some really fun podcast conversations centered around the whole “respect for people” topic. My friend and colleague, Jon Miller, challenged the idea of whether lean is really all about people. Fellow lean thinker Michael Ballé then joined in on the conversation and while it wasn’t an argument,
This week’s guests are Jacob Stoller and Mauricio Miller. Ron, Jacob, and Mauricio discussed the Family Independence Initiative, and how a lean-like approach can be used to create real social change. An MP3 version of this episode is available for download here. In this episode you’ll learn: How Jacob met
In part 1, we learned about recalcitrance and how it could prevent a fast takeoff of a superintelligence. We then drew a comparison to organizations investing effort into becoming smarter by learning and improving on a continual basis. How hard is it for an organization practicing continuous improvement to get
This week’s guests are Jon Miller and Michael Ballé. Together with Ron, they discussed the definitions of lean, success, and strategy, as well as using lean as a strategy for innovation and growth. An MP3 version of this episode is available for download here. In this episode you’ll learn: Defining
Superintelligence, as defined in the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom, is “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” Humans are already building and expanding upon intelligent systems, albeit slowly. The book asks questions about the future when machine intelligence, machine-human