Where does a Customer Find Value in your Organization

Have you ever evaluated where your customer finds value within your company? In Lean you try to find the one best path – the value stream map. In the marketing, we have created the marketing funnel. However, Organizations can no longer feed products to customers, as I described in the blog post, Kill the Sales Read More …

Can you Lean yourself

In a past blog post, How do you handle inputs into your life?, I discussed the book A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance. Next week’s Business901 Podcast features the author, Dan Markovitz, founder and owner of TimeBack Management. Timeback is a consultancy specializing in improving individual Read More …

Defining the Roles of Lean IT

The IT Department now touches every corner of the organization and many times is responsible for the first touchpoint a customer has with your organization. No longer is IT a bunch of Geeks in the back room. Learn from Steve Bell, one of the foremost experts in the Lean IT world. This is a transcription Read More …

Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell

The Business901 podcast guest this week is Steve Bell, the founder of Lean IT Strategies LLC. Steve is a Lean Enterprise Institute faculty member, Shingo Research Prize winning author, and Lean IT pioneer. A recent blog post, When Standard Work and Customer Focus come together contains an excerpt from the podcast. In the podcast, we Read More …

The Aroma of a Good Vision

Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI continues to share the “secrets” that have helped take Zingerman’s from a 25-seat, 4-person start up to a nationally known, $40,000,000-organization employing over 500 people. In this Business901 podcast, Ari discusses his latest book A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Being a Better Leader. Read More …

Transforming Lean thru Middle Managers

My guest on the Business901 podcast this week was Paul Yandell of Value Stream Focus and we discussed one of my favorite topics – Middle Management.  Paul Yandell, led a lean transformation that won the 2007 Pacific Northwest Silver Medallion Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing.  Business Week called the Shingo Prize the “Nobel Prize Read More …