Archive for May, 2010

Tom Ehrenfeld: How do we convince others to be lean? By Tom Ehrenfeld, author of The Startup Garden and A Leader's Study Guide To The Gold Mine - Last updated: Monday, May 31, 2010

Jeff Liker: Lean is an Innovation in Thinking Which Will Foster Many Other Innovations By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Wednesday, May 26, 2010

I agree that many people get confused on the relationship between lean and innovation.  Steve Spear explained very well that underlying this is a confusion about what innovation is.  In reality the greatest innovators are disciplined thinkers who try incremental experiments one by one learning from each.  Thomas Edison was famous for his discipline and for learning from all his failed light bulbs before finally finding something that worked.  The something that worked represented accumulated learning from years of smaller experiments that proved incremental principles and that showed what does not work.  Unfortunately when we see the results of a ...

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Michael Ballé: An Innovative Way of Looking At Innovation By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Peter Drucker once said: “since the purpose of business is to generate customers, only two functions do this: marketing and innovation.” This doesn’t seem to leave much place for lean, since lean starts with operational effectiveness – in effect the ‘industrial smile” with engineering at one end, sales & marketing at the other and production down in the middle (all problems, no glory). Nonetheless, the lean approach extends way beyond manufacturing and into engineering and contributes in specific and unique ways to innovation. Innovation is a vast word, and we can take it to mean three different things. First is the ...

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Dan Jones: Lean Insights before Lean Innovation By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Tuesday, May 25, 2010

I have always thought that innovation rather than simply quality, delivery and cost was the real purpose and ultimate result of lean thinking; innovation in terms of the products and services we design, in how we relate to customers and in how we find new ways of working together to create value. The experience with lean is that it leads to new capabilities which in turn open up new business models that turn the tables on the competition and reshape whole industries. In other words lean insights can lead to lean innovations. There is no short cut. Think of it this ...

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Jim Huntzinger: Innovation, The Scientific Method By Jim Huntzinger, Author of 'Lean Cost Management: Accounting for Lean by Establishing Flow' - Last updated: Sunday, May 16, 2010

I see applying lean and innovation as one in the same. While innovation seem to be commonly thought of spontaneously emerging from some mad scientist-type locked in some secret lab somewhere, most innovation actually comes from a much more mundane source.  And in a lean environment it certainly does come from a common source.  And this source is operators, supervisors, engineers, and managers. Since innovation is most often an evolutionary and iterative process, it is critical to have a structure which, not only helps people to behave and think in this manner, but one that also gives them the infrastructure to physically ...

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Mike Rother: A Newer and Better Definition of Lean By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Sunday, May 16, 2010

Dennis Sherwood asked:  What is the difference between innovation and lean? I agree with Art Smalley that the answer depends on what definitions of innovation and lean you are using. And from my recent observations I would say that our definitions of both of these terms, i.e., our understanding of the mechanisms behind them, are now evolving. Better definitions are coming We have tended to define "lean" more or less as eliminating waste, but by now we can see that this concept is too limited. And we have tended to think of "innovation" as new solutions and levels of performance that come from ...

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Steven Spear: Innovation is the reward of mastery By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Friday, May 14, 2010

There is a conventional wisdom that 'lean' and other efforts towards process excellence and 'innovation' conflict, the former about standardization and rigidity, the latter about free-flowing creativity. There are reasons for those wisdoms, but they miss the significant complement between rigor in design and speed in improvement. Lean grew out of efforts in the 1980s to understand Toyota's success catching American auto makers. People found approaches, particularly in the shop floor environment that allowed select organizations to operate with far greater stability and far less chaos than was the norm elsewhere. That stability and order led to far better ...

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Art Smalley: People, Product, & Process Improvement By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Thursday, May 13, 2010

The difference between innovation and lean will depend a lot upon semantics and whose definition of "innovation" and "lean" we are using. For whatever reason the innovation tag seems to be applied a lot in situations where people are looking to improve products. The lean tag seems to get applied to factories trying to improve production processes. Successful companies though will need to work upon improving products, processes, and their people as well. In Toyota the concepts of respect for people and continuous improvement (Kaizen) are the pillars of the system. Kaizen has a strange connotation to me at least here ...

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Mark Graban: Every Employee Is An Innovator By Mark Graban, Author of the 'Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction,' winner of the Shingo Prize in 2009. Creator of leanblog.org, and Senior Fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute. On twitter as @leanblog. - Last updated: Tuesday, May 11, 2010

"Innovation" is a trendy business buzzword - it's much more appealing, generally speaking, to executives than the term "lean" is. Innovation is sexy and fun. Lean sounds dull and monotonous. Improve continuously -- who has the patience for that? Not those who would rather swing for the fences and find that one silver-bullet home run innovation that will ensure future profits. Lean organizations, while not ignoring large innovations (think Toyota Prius), also focus on daily innovation through Lean and process improvement methods, like kaizen. It's often thought, mistakenly, that Lean and innovation can't go together. Those who think Lean created rigid, ...

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Denis Sherwood: How would you develop innovation from lean and vice-versa? By Dennis Sherwood, Author of Forest for the Trees and Smart Things to Know about Innovation and Creativity - Last updated: Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Michael Ballé: Learning To Think in Terms Of Lead Time By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Saturday, May 1, 2010

"Some people imagine that Toyota has put on a smart new set of clothes, the kanban system,” writes Shigeo Shingo more than twenty years ago, “so they go out and purchase the same outfit and try it on. They quickly discover they are much too fat to wear it! They must eliminate waste and make fundamental improvements in their production system before techniques like kanban can be of any help.” Lean IS about having no back-up inventory (or at least not much) and no workaround system, but it’ about getting there, not deciding this arbitrarily. We’ve all seen companies who do ...

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