Lesson Archives - Lean East

25Dec 2019 by Steve Musica No Comments

Develop Scientific Thinking with Lean Kata

This month we are happy to share a simple yet powerful tool that will benefit any organization. It is the Lean Kata approach for developing a culture of scientific thinking at all levels of any organization. What does the word “kata” mean? Kata is the Japanese word for “form” and refers to a detailed, choreographed pattern of movements practiced alone or in groups. Anyone who has ever practiced the martial arts has performed katas in front of a sensei to advance and earn additional belts. The kata allows the trainee to memorize and perfect the movements being executed so they can easily make the movements later using muscle memory. The Lean Kata was developed by Toyota and has been well described in the Mike Rother book, Toyota Kata:…

27Oct 2019 by Steve Musica No Comments

Maximize the benefits of a huddle meeting

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Workers often complain that meetings waste too much of their day. Work time spent in meetings has increased over the past 20 years, and a Harvard Business Review survey found over 70% of senior leaders believe meetings keep them from completing their work. We at Lean East believe that one meeting is more important than others for a team – the team huddle. Our team has worked with many organizations over the years and supported implementing and improving huddles. A well-run huddle is likely the single most effective meeting a leader will have with a team. We will answer eight common questions about huddles to help leaders and teams maximize the benefits. What is the difference between a huddle and a scrum meeting? Let’s begin by clarifying the difference…

19Aug 2019 by Steve Musica 1 Comment

Allowing For Trial & Error

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We are pleased to offer our monthly lesson as a video post! You can read the lesson below, which is a formatted transcript of the presentation, or watch the 5-minute video embedded at the end. Allowing For Trial & Error: A Better Way To Grow & Compete Have you ever worked in a place where the goal is to be unnoticed and the boss visits your area only if you are about to hear bad news? I have seen too many organizations where employees just go through the motions, doing what they are told. Raises and advancements at these workplaces are based primarily on not making mistakes. Employees are told what to do and managers make the decisions. There is no incentive to take on a challenge, learn new…

28Jul 2019 by Steve Musica No Comments

Lean Innovation for Growth

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Our two previous posts introduced the Need for Lean Innovation and Lean Startup Thinking. In our conversations about Startup Thinking and Innovation, we want to clearly encourage that these innovation tools and strategies work for established companies equally as well as they do for start-ups. In fact, most of the companies Lean East supports are mature companies, not early-stage companies with a nascent product idea to test. In this post we will like to show that there are four primary types of innovation for existing companies, as presented by the Harvard Business Review article "You need an Innovation Strategy," Gary P. Pisano in 2015. The four types are described by whether they feature a business model innovation or technical competency innovation. Then we share three suggestions for existing companies who…

30May 2019 by Steve Musica No Comments

The Need for Lean Innovation

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As recently as 15-years ago, most markets had few competitors and significant barriers to entry. Management would decide what product to build, budget the work and assign engineers and developers to the project team. New product development projects would often last for many years. Similarly, companies providing services would keep an eye on market competition and take the long-approach for releasing new offerings, often protected from competition by regional control and deep reputation. Today, the internet, open-sourced solutions, and social media have leveled the playing field. Consumers have one-click buying options for new products at their fingertips. New internet-based services disrupt long-standing businesses such as taxi transportation, insurance, legal services and healthcare. Customers will switch quickly and often to better solutions. Every day our world continues to become more complex.…

10Apr 2019 by Steve Musica 1 Comment

Are you a “Super Nurse” on your Team?

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Does your organization have a person on staff who everyone can go to in order to get a problem solved? For example, someone who knows how to obtain guest Wi-Fi access for a visiting contractor? Who is the same person who can always find that hidden file on the network, and knows how to correct the mistake in your EMR or MRP system? Perhaps your organization is a customer-facing business and this person also goes above and beyond to follow up with a customer who has a special request and double-checks every item before your product goes out the door. Picture a person on your team who matches this description. Or, are you that person on your team? People who save the day and rescue a team from disaster…

25Feb 2019 by Raija Suomela No Comments

Lean and Agile – Ideas that Work Together

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Five similarities between Lean and Agile Readers of our blog will be familiar with Lean fundamentals. Many of you have completed improvement projects or attended workshops such as our ‘Introduction to Lean Thinking’ course. Readers of our blog are past or current clients, or people we have connected with in LinkedIn Groups (we recommend Lean Six Sigma and Operational Excellence as great sources of information and energy). Likewise, many of our readers will know that the goal of Lean is to maximize customer value by minimizing non-value added “waste” in processes. Lean changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services across technologies and departments. But what about Agile? Some members of our community have started to hear whispering of ‘Agile’ in the hallway -…

30Jan 2019 by Steve Musica No Comments

8 Lean Wastes: Transportation vs Motion

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We enjoy teaching the 8 Wastes of Lean Thinking to our clients and the participants in our training workshops. As instructors, we share examples of wastes from our professional experience in both manufacturing and service-related organizations. Together, we brainstorm ways in which the wastes reveal themselves in our attendees' organizations. One question that gives us pause in every Introduction to Lean Thinking workshop is the request to explain the nuance of two 'movement' wastes - motion and transportation. Motion The motion waste focuses on the movement of people or equipment that is unnecessary. It is any movement beyond the minimum required for completing the process step. The motion waste is typically found within a workspace or process step rather than between steps. Walking to a community printer or searching for information or a tool are…

30Dec 2018 by Steve Musica 1 Comment

7 Lessons from Good to Great

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Influential management professor Jim Collins released the popular Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don’t in 2001. The book is really a research project led by Collins as a follow-up to his book Built to Last. He researched hundreds of companies to identify sets of “good” companies where one became “great” while a close competitor failed. Collins and his team tried to discover what the “great” companies did differently from the comparison companies and the general market. The book is a bestseller that has become a management strategy classic on how to grow a successful company and our team has given the book as a gift to numerous organizational leaders. Key points can be summarized by the image below – this post will summarize the key…

12Oct 2018 by Steve Musica No Comments

When: Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

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This post is a summary of the key learnings from the 2018 book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink. The book was an instant bestseller from the well-known author, and draws upon recent research from psychology, biology, neuroscience and economics. It is easy to read with many great examples and stories to demonstrate that Timing is really a science. This post synthesizes the main takeaways from each chapter of the book to save our readers some time! Figure Out Your Daily When Are you a morning lark, night owl, or third bird? To find out, identify the midpoint of your typical night’s sleep- halfway between going to sleep and waking up. If the midpoint is before 3 AM you are probably a lark.…