Consumer’s risk, also known as beta risk or type-II risk, is the chance of a bad product being identified incorrectly as good and escaping to the purchaser. In technical terms, it is the act of accepting the null hypothesis (that the product is good), when the alternate hypothesis (that the product is bad) is actually true. There are some fairly sophisticated statistics that go into the analysis of consumer’s risk. Basically, you can make testing Read more…
The term ‘Natural Born Leader’ is a myth. You aren’t born with leadership skills. You may be born attractive, tall, muscular. You may be gifted by your parents with a brain that fires a lot more neurons than the typical person. Of course, you also may be born to end up bald with hands that sweat profusely when you get even the slightest bit nervous. So, yes. The deck can be genetically stacked in favor Read more…
Spend more than 5 minutes with a Lean consultant, and you will hear about building a “continuous improvement culture.” That’s because it is one of the bedrocks of any philosophy about improving an organization. You’ve got to have people committed to change, that believe in the tools to make change happen, and that have faith in their leadership. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. Does that clarify things? What I mean by Read more…
One of the things I teach people when doing data collection and analysis is to be suspicious whenever anything unexpected happens. If you suddenly see a major uptick in your productivity numbers or a monumental drop in your defect rate, make sure you understand why, or it WILL come back to bite you. Here’s a case in point. Wasatch County, in Utah, recently held an emergency council meeting to deal with a budget shortfall. Now, Read more…
There’s a common question among people new to Lean. As they become familiar with what this continuous improvement philosophy has to offer, they realize that it will also come at a steep cost in terms on the investment of time. They realize that there is a lot of learning and practicing to be done. Because continuous improvement cultures require broad acceptance, everyone in the organization needs training. People in specialize roles will need even more Read more…
I was taking a break recently and was perusing my FaceBook feed. One post in particular caught my attention. “Anyone know how to blog successfully?” Without stating the obvious, since you are reading this on what I like to think is a blog with at least a shred of success, I replied. Now if you know me from my writings or if you’ve worked with me, you might be able to figure out what my Read more…
One of the great things about Lean is that it is chock full of tools. Unfortunately, this can also create a problem for some people. Because there are so many great tools, they immediately reach for one of those tools before really thinking about the problem they are facing. In these cases, having so many quick and easy choices can be a barrier to improvement. They are trying to fit the problem to the tool Read more…
There’s a general feeling that compromise is a good thing. In most cases, in the real world where relationships is the ‘product’, it is. Compromising on how you pick movies, or who does what chores, or selecting meals is pretty important in relationships. But at work, compromise is generally a failure. That’s because relationships are a means to an end. Good relationships are important at work, but you don’t judge a company’s performance by how Read more…
I just saw a rather interesting article on Elon Musk’s rules for meetings on Business Insider.
One of the most commonly told stories about Lean is of the chalk circle. Taiichi Ohno, the father of modern Lean, would draw a circle on the floor in chalk and tell his engineers or managers to stand in it to watch an operation. His instruction was simply “Watch.” After a period of time, he would return and ask a few questions. If the answers did not show sufficient understanding of the issues, he would Read more…
In good Lean operations, blame is never the goal of problem-solving efforts. It is sometimes a byproduct, as, on occasion, the facts lead you to a specific person. But even then, in most cases, their shortcomings are the result of either a poor process or poor training. True people problems as a cause for mistakes are less common than most think. Despite this, companies that don’t embrace a continuous improvement culture frequently find themselves more Read more…
“Average” is the layperson’s way of saying arithmetic mean. It is one of the measures of central tendency and is determined by taking the sum of all the data points in the set divided by the number of data points in the set. Average is a measure of central tendency and gives some insight into the nature of the data. Be careful, though, as the average can be misleading if there are outliers. Take the Read more…
