Blog Carnival Annual Roundup: 2011: The 99 Percent Solution

I am honored this year to be part of John Hunter’s Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival. John is one of the pioneers in just not using internet technology but in using it to improve organizational performance and in a way to get results. I encourage you to browse his site. It is littered with Read More …

How a Jazz Quartet exhibits Pull

Stefon Harris: There are no mistakes on the bandstand – What is a mistake? By talking through examples with his improvisational Jazz quartet, Stefon Harris walks us to a profound truth: many actions are perceived as mistakes only because we don’t react to them appropriately. More importantly, Stefon description of how pull works in the Read More …

Six Sources of Influence in Change

From my blog post, The Difficulty of Mastery = The Difficulty of Lean, I started discussing the book, Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success . I found the work paralleling Lean in many of its approaches and put Lean practices in parenthesis. Their strategy is based on four simple steps: Identify Crucial Moments Read More …

If less than 1% of companies are successful with Lean

I have seen numerous times where Dr. Jeffrey Liker prominent author of the Toyota Way Series has claimed that less than 1% of companies are successful with Lean. I am not sure what criteria he bases this number on exactly but if he is even close why are we doing it? If you have studied Read More …

Business901 #1 Podcast of the Year

Jim (“Cope”) Coplien podcast, Coplien on Agile, Lean and Architecture was the most listened Business901 podcast of the year. In the podcast, we discussed his new book, Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development. Cope’s view on Lean and Agile is quite interesting and his knowledge of the subject goes far beyond the software practices that Read More …