Lean is Not Lean
9 January 2008
Another day, another company whacking a bunch of people. Knowledge, creativity, experience, and potential ideas being thrown out the window. Kraft Fo…
Forget the Painters, Just Create Artists
7 January 2008
We often hear of traditional businesses being segregated into binary classes... chiefs and indians, queens and drones, conductor and musicians... you…
Parade, Bhutto, and Long Lead Times
7 January 2008
On December 27th the world was shocked by the news of the assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto. A powerful woman leader, controversial in th…
Good Luck With That...
5 January 2008
German manufacturer MAN has been dipping its toes into the wonderful world of lean manufacturing. At Munich, Germany-based MAN Nutzfahrzeuge—the 13-p…
Congrats AME!
5 January 2008
The next annual conference of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence will be held in Toronto this October 20-24. Each of the last several confer…
The Waste of Color
4 January 2008
Those of you that watched the Orange Bowl last night may have seen a rather amusing commercial where a guy walks into a copy store with a stack of bla…
New Year's Resolution: Simplify and Learn
26 December 2007
Two years ago I wrote about how lean manufacturing concepts can be applied to the home, and suggested some New Year's resolutions. From 5S to inve…
The Myopia of the Pessimists
26 December 2007
I often rant against the outsourcing lemmings that insist on chasing low labor costs around the world while not looking inward to find efficiency impr…