Gotta Go Lean Blog Info
I see the world as full of opportunity and every day I think about Lean: at the grocery store, at the gym, even when I am hiking.
Many of these ideas turn into products, wind up in our newsletter, or get added to entries in The Continuous Improvement Companion.
But sometimes I just want to share my thoughts with the world at large, in the hopes that it makes someone’s day a little better because of it.
Thanks for your interest in the Gotta Go Lean Blog.
Jeff Hajek
How to Find Articles
You can look at the bottom of the page to see a list of Gotta Go Lean articles. If you want more detail, please click on ‘Reference/FREE Stuff’ in the naviagation bar above, and select ‘Gotta Go Lean’ to see my previous entries. This will give you a little summary of each post, starting with the most recent. Of course, you can also use the search feature at the top of the page to find what you are looking for.
2019 Articles
- Build a Lean Infrastructure
- Compromise is a Failure in Continuous Improvement
- Don’t Be a Servant to the Lean Tools
- Ease of Making Changes vs. Willingness to Change
- Elon Musk’s 3 Rules for Meetings, and How They Relate to Lean
- Follow Your Processes to Prevent Chaos
- Granting Autonomy to Your Team
- Heading Off Emotional Responses
- How Do You Define Success?
- Lean Lessons From the Seattle Snowmageddon
- Never Trust a Windfall: A Lesson on Data Collection and Analysis
- Not Recognizing Problems Exist is a BIG Problem
- Selecting a Kaizen Team
- Success Factors When Starting A Continuous Improvement Journey
- The Perception of Activity
- Warning Signs When Starting A Continuous Improvement Journey
- Why Patient Satisfaction Metrics Are Bad for Healthcare
- You’ll NEVER “Find” Time for Continuous Improvement
2018 Articles
- My First Question When I Am Doing Lean Consulting (Video)
- Seek the Truth
- Sometimes People ARE the Problem
- Sports and the PDCA Cycle
- Value-Added Work Quick Check (Video)
2016 Articles
- 15 Things Consultants Add That You Should Be Doing On Your Own
- Key Principles for a Lean Business System
2014 Articles
- 11 Common Continuous Improvement Mistakes You Are Probably Making
- Leadership style and neural networks – Part 3
- Social Media Etiquette and Lean
2013 Articles
- 11 Common Misconceptions About Lean
- A Better Way to Save Lives
- Applying Lean in Uncommon Ways
- Are You Worrying About the Right Things?
- Do You Suffer From SCS (Squirrel Chasing Syndrome)?
- How Easy is “Easy”?
- Interview with Karen Martin (Podcast)
- Measure the Things You Can Control
- New Data Collection Video: Understanding the Types of Data
- Only Read This Article If You Are Above Average at Work
- PDCA: Predict-Do-Check-Act?
- POLL: How common are KPI boards in your company?
- Poll: How does your company make time for improvements?
- Poll: How is Lean received by frontline employees when it is introduced?
- POLL: How long will it take a typical company to become “Lean”?
- POLL: How many internal CI experts/consultants should a company have?
- POLL: Is Toyota Overrated?
- Poll: What Are the Most Important Lean Leadership Traits?
- POLL: What is the source of improvement activity in your company?
- POLL: What training products would help you the most?
- Poll: Who has contributed the most to modern Lean?
- Systems vs. Tools: A Lean Lesson from The Big Bang Theory
- Talking Lean (Episode #1, 6-14-2013)
- Talking Lean (Episode #2, 7-1-2013)
- The Art of Saying “No”
- The Employee Engagement Cycle
- The Irony of Yahoo’s Teleworking Decision
- The Lean Machine (Guest Post from Tony Ferraro)
- Think Like Your Competitor to Beat Your Competitor
- Value Stream Mapping Podcast with Karen Martin
- Weekly Update (April 12, 2013)
- Weekly Update (April 19, 2013)
- Weekly Update (April 26, 2013)
- Weekly Update (April 5, 2013)
- Weekly Update (May 13, 2013)
- Weekly Update (May 3, 2013)
- What Crows Can Teach You About Lean
- What is the Value of a Real Estate Agent?
- What Kids and a Puddle Can Teach Us about Adult Behaviors
- Where Will Lean Be In 10 Years?
- Why Educators Think Every Kid Is The Same
- Why Is the Government So Fond of Batching?
- Why Offense and Defense Scoring Rankings are Horrible Metrics for the NFL
2012 Articles
- 6 Big Data Analysis Mistakes That Hinder Lean Efforts
- 6 Ways to Improve Problem Solving in Your Company
- A Quarter Million Viewers Can’t Be Wrong
- Are You Kidding Me? You Call That a Metric?
- Checking Your Lean Progress (+Video)
- Gotcha! Oh, Wait. Do I Know You?
- Guess What. Tired People Make More Mistakes. (Surprised?)
- How a Hockey Stadium Can Provide a Lean Lesson
- How Deep Is Your Team’s Talent?
- Lean Litmus Test Question 1: Do small goals add up to big success?
- Lean Litmus Test Question 2: Do You Know Where You Are?
- Lean Litmus Test Question 3: What Will Your Team Accomplish Today?
- Lean Litmus Test Question 4: What’s the Problem(s)?
- Lean Litmus Test Question 5: Is There Understanding Before Action?
- Let Me Think for Seven Minutes
- Preschool, Rainbows, and Kaizen
- Quatily Is Important
- The Lean Assessment Litmus Test
- The Secret Formula to Success in Anything. (Really, There’s a Formula!)
- The World’s Great Equalizer: The DMV
- What Spammers and Scammers Can Teach You About Lean
- Why Lean Can’t Be as Effective in Healthcare as in Other Industries
2011 Articles
- 10 Random Tips to Supercharge You On Your Lean Journey (Webinar Recording)
- 12 Ways to Start Building a Continuous Improvement Culture (+Video)
- 13 Ways to Apply Lean Principles to a Small Business
- 8 Ways to Develop Winning Teams in Lean Organizations (Webinar Recording)
- 9 Steps to Better Metrics (+Video)
- 9 Words That Kill Lean Progress
- An Overlooked Benefit of Kaizen Events
- Are You Driven to Learn Lean? (Webinar Recording)
- Building a Continuous Improvement Culture Webinar Recording
- Cancelled Travel Plans Means More 5S Info
- Communicating Your Improvement Initiative
- Continuous Improvement: It’s not just for the law-abiding anymore
- Cursive is Dead. Long Live the Keyboard.
- Don’t Be Scared of Being Scared
- Don’t Trust New Technology!
- Every Approval Is a Leadership Failure
- Featured Lean Thinker: Chris Paulsen
- Featured Lean Thinker: Jeff Hajek
- Free (Lean) Tax Advice
- Give Us Your Opinion on Gotta Go Lean Article Types
- How Do YOU Approach An Idea?
- How Lean Fights Obsolescence
- Lean Escape Velocity
- Lean Success in Public vs. Private Companies
- Make Sure There’s a Hole in Your Hoop
- My Daughter Taught Me Again
- Neuroscience and Lean
- One Person’s Value Stream is Another Person’s Waste
- Recording of Our “8 Ways to Create an Infrastructure that Supports Lean” Webinar
- Take “Can’t” Out of Your Vocabulary
- The Case for Continuous Improvement
- The Problem With PDCA
- The Real Problem with Air Traffic Controllers Sleeping
- The Surprising Truth about Automotive Quality
- The Truth about Financial Incentives
- There’s More to “Lights, Camera, Action”
- Toyota Under Fire Book Review
- Webinar Recording: 8 Things to Avoid to Make Your Kaizen Successful
- What I Learned from Almost Winning the Shingo Prize
- What Lean Is Really All About
- What My 8 Year-Old Daughter Taught Me About Lean
- What’s Your Approach to 5S?
- Why Managers Are Bottlenecks
2010 Articles
- 11 Principles of a Lean Office (+Video)
- 12 Predictions about Lean in 2011
- 18 Principles of Lean Leadership
- 3 Ways to Sneak Lean into Your Company
- 7 Tips to Build Good (Lean) Behavior
- 8 Reasons People Resist Change (+Video +MP3)
- 9 Steps to Developing a Daily Management System (+Video +MP3)
- 9 Tips to Running a More Effective Kaizen
- A Bad Employee Attitude Resonates Throughout an Organization
- A Common Lean Problem: Mismatched Expectations
- A Healthcare Poka Yoke Against MRSA
- A Lean Prognostication
- A Paradox of Lean: Job Control Rises and Falls at the Same Time
- Be Happy. It Pays. And It Could Save Your Life.
- BLUF Your Way Through Meetings
- Correlation or Causation? Interceptions and the Playoffs.
- Could Lean Help Me Go Pro?
- Deming’s Great Lapse in Logic
- Do Goals Limit Team Performance?
- Does Lean Need Agile?
- Does Your Leadership Style Create Management Waste?
- Domino’s Restaurant Kaizen
- Don’t Blindly Follow Directions
- Don’t Debate Something That Can Be Measured
- Don’t Go Crazy with Your 5S
- Employee-Customer Relationships and Airlines
- Every Conflict Comes From a Gap in Expectations
- Failure Isn’t Really Failure
- Featured Lean Thinker: Evan Durant
- Featured Lean Thinker: Jay Watson
- Featured Lean Thinker: Mark Graban
- Featured Lean Thinker: Mark Rosenthal
- Featured Lean Thinker: Tim McMahon
- Find a Factory Whisperer
- Guess What. You’re Not Unique.
- High Energy + No Direction = Problems!
- High School Math and Lean
- How Can Healthcare Be So Good and So Bad?
- How to Overcome 24 Common Lean Excuses
- Implementing Lean in 3 (Not So) Easy Steps
- Inspect Your Inspections
- Interruptions and Lean
- Introducing Lean Larry and How He Used Visual Work Instructions
- Is Success Possible?
- Is Toyota Still the Champ?
- It’s About Time!
- Job Stress and Lean…and Rainbows?
- Kaizen Creativity: Breaking Preconceived Notions
- Leading Change: What’s Good for the Goose ISN’T Good for the Gander
- Lean and the News
- Lean and the Trapeze
- Lean Education: Can it Work?
- Lean Leadership Soft Skills
- Lean Lessons from Steve Jobs Being Poked with a Stick
- Lean Results: Don’t Believe the Hype (At Least in a Kaizen Report Out)
- Lean Wins!
- Lean, Poka Yokes, and Taxi Cabs
- Lean, Reasons, and Excuses
- Learning Lean Through Making Coffee (Recorded Webinar)
- Looking Over the Wall (Lean Podcast)
- Morning Walkthrough Tips
- My Braces and Lean
- Obstacles to Lean
- Office Space Meets the Real World
- Peanut Butter and Jelly. Starsky and Hutch. Inspection and Quality?
- Performance Reviews are a Batch Process
- Podcast: Frontline Lean Leadership with Tim McMahon
- Podcast: The Differences Between Lean on the Shop Floor and In the Office
- Podcast: The Lean Management Mindset, Part 1
- Podcast: The Lean Management Mindset, Part 2
- Poka Yoke? Or Poka Yuck…
- Predictive Problem Solving
- Process Improvement and the Census
- Production Problems and Documentation and Toyota
- Randomness and Lean and Perfect Games
- Selling More to Make Less Is a Bad Combination
- Stumbling Into Success
- The Hardest Step of Problem Solving
- The Madden Curse and Lean
- The Meaning of Lean (+Video)
- The One-Week Move-to-Gemba Managers’ Challenge
- The Secret to Successfully Running a Lean Office: Daily Management
- The Secret Trick for Office Kaizen Success
- The Symphony of Standard Work
- The Three Lean Books a New Shop Floor Manager MUST Own
- The TSA and the Kobayashi Maru
- The Unforgiving Minute
- TV Shows that Teach Lean
- Using Lean in My Own Business
- Using Video to Support the Process Walk
- Value, Shmalue
- What If Meetings Were Lean?
- What If You Had to Sign the Other Side of the Check?
- What’s at the Core of Lean?
- When Bacon and Kaizen Collide…
- When Good Processes Go Bad…
- Why Daily Management is Like a Petri Dish for Lean
- Why I Hate Shadowboards
- Why is a Lean Call Center like the Tour de France?
- You Want Me To Do What????
2009 Articles
- 17 Lessons I Learned from Japanese Consultants
- 5 Principles of Lean Customer Value
- 5 Why Analysis-Lean Training Video
- 8 Ways to Address the “WIFM” Principle
- A Hundred Million People Just Went ‘Huh?’
- Abnormal Conditions and Parking Lots
- Andon: Lean Superhero
- Attitude, Employee Behavior, Customer Service, and Lean
- Be Flexible in Your Kaizen Project
- Benchmark Lean: Difficulties Copying the Toyota Production System. Lean TPS Information.
- Benefit of Lean: Is Lean Really Easier?
- Benefits, Lean or Otherwise, Depend on Perspective
- Categories of Waste: Why They Don’t Really Matter
- Collective Intelligence and Lean. How to Harness All of Your Team’s Brainpower
- Communication. Lean Depends on It.
- Competition at Work. How Lean Principles Can Help.
- Continuous Improvement Teams: 6 Reasons Why Crab Fishing on Deadliest Catch is a Model for Lean Managers & Employees
- Costs of Business. What Does ‘Cost’ Really Mean?
- Customer Service-Lean: First Impressions Last
- Customer Service: Retention to an Extreme
- Customer Value Added. Helping the customer get more value out of using your product.
- Don’t Let Cost Reduction Eliminate Customer Value
- Dumb Jobs: Dirt Can’t Hide. Dumb Can.
- Establishing Standards: How Using Incentives Helps
- Examples of Lean: Teach Your Teams With Examples They Can Relate To (+Video)
- External and Internal Customers in Lean
- Fishbone / Ishikawa / Cause and Effect Diagram Video Training
- Gauge Go/No-Go. Can You Be Lean and Not Even Know It?
- Gotta Go Lean Podcast: Where Is Lean Useful?
- Government Lean. The TSA and Process Improvement.
- How to 5S. Or More Accurately, How NOT to 5S.
- How to Organize Cables with 5S
- How to: Visual Management. Lean in the Airport.
- Identifying Waste: Stop. Don’t Look. Listen. 15 Sounds That Shout Waste.
- Implementing Kaizen: How Late Should Kaizen Teams Work?
- Improvement Objectives In Lean
- In Lean Jobs, Experience Is Less Important
- Inspection and Quality. How the NFL Can Teach You About Lean.
- Is There Value in Lean Certification?
- Is Your Leadership Style a Bottleneck to Creativity?
- Kaizen at Home, Holiday Style!
- Lean Measurement: It’s all in how you measure it…
- Lean Overview (+ Podcast)
- Lean Podcast-Managing the Fear of Failure in Lean
- Lean Problems: Why Not Dream Big?
- Lean Six Sigma Staffing. 8 Traits of People Who Excel at Continuous Improvement & Boost Productivity
- Lean Standard Work in 8 (Not So) Easy Steps
- Lean System vs. Lean Tools
- Lean Versus Batch Manufacturing Video
- Lean Workplace: Group Dynamics, Basketball, and Lean Projects
- Learning Lean: Always Re-learning Lean Lessons
- Make Quality Better: Eliminate Hammers
- Management, Lean, and Leadership Skills
- Managing Expectations in 3 Steps
- Marketing: Lean and Your Brand
- Mirror, Mirror on my Workbench, Who’s the Quickest with a Wrench?
- Mistake Proofing: Temporary Speed Bumps and Schools Zones
- Muda. Muda. Muda. Muda.
- Office Process Flow and IF-THEN Statements
- Out of Box Thinking…from an Insurance Company?
- Outsourcing Homework? It Was Bound to Happen.
- Overprocessing Waste: A Different Spin on the Waste of Overprocessing.
- Personal Kaizen: Getting Lean the Lean Way
- Poka Yoke Devices and Airlines
- Prevent Layoffs: Use Lean Skills to Protect Your Job
- Problem Solving: Creative Ideas Don’t Have to Cost a Fortune
- Process Observation: Watch Before You Ask
- Productive Work: How to Quickly Gauge Worker Productivity
- Productivity Incentives That Work
- Seven Wastes of Lean Leadership and Taiichi Ohno’s Seven Wastes
- Standard Work Procedures: Hand-Written or Computer Generated?
- Standardization: Process Enhancer or Creativity Killer?
- Standardizing Personal Processes
- Stray Jet Follow-Up
- Supplier Criteria: Do They Apply to Internal Suppliers, too?
- Team Members Late to Meetings During a Kaizen Blitz? Not Anymore!
- The Employee Reprimand: Is It Effective?
- The Standard Work Process: Overcoming Obstacles to Making Effective Standard Work
- The Visual Workplace: Shorten Those Shelves!
- TPM: How to Protect Million-Dollar Athletes and Production Machines
- Ums and Ahs: Improving Your Public Speaking
- Value the Customer: That Didn’t Seem Faster…
- Web Surfing Best Practices
- What 5S (Lean) disease strikes millions?
- Work Lean: Ride the Continuous Improvement Wave
- You’re in! Nope. Just kidding. Quality control in administrative processes.
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