Customers are front and center when it comes to lean transformations. We want to win them over, delight them, keep them, strengthen the relationship and grow the business, by continuously improving what we do. Too often for non-services business that are not face-to-face with the customer every day, it is

Mura, muri, muda. Three words that someone should have taught the civic leaders of Houston decades ago. This trio explains how systems break, why we waste our resources, and why people suffer worse than we should from predictable disasters. Mura is variation, variability or unevenness. When there are differences between

A person works in intelligence told me a few things about that profession. Here is a summary of a few similarities between good spy craft and good business leadership that come with lean thinking. Go to the gemba. Intelligence gathering happens by going out into the field. We can’t get

I found an interesting parallel between lean thinking and game mastery in a book about the history of board games by Tristan Donovan titled It’s All A Game. In a section of the book discussing chess, the author introduced an insight about how the minds of chess masters work. Psychologist