Oct 18 2015
Last week, I posted a quote about a car industry executive and asked you to guess who it was from a list of famous leaders. 12 of the 29 respondents thought is was about Taiichi Ohno, and only 5 about Ferdinand Porsche, the designer of the best selling car in history, the Volkswagen Beetle, among others, including early electric and hybrid cars.
By Michel Baudin • Polls • 2 • Tags: Automotive industry, car industry
Oct 11 2015
The following is a quote about a prominent car industry executive:
“The workers at the factory were not used to the boss being so hands-on. Their previous boss was a behind-the-scenes manager and had rarely shown his face on the floor. But he was almost always in their midst. This was a place where distance was part of the work environment and certain lines were just not crossed. He crossed them. The engineers in their clean white coats were offended when he climbed under their test cars and growled at them for not having figured out things he could see quite clearly. They had to get their hands dirty, he said, and stop all this standing around.”
By Michel Baudin • Polls • 1 • Tags: Automotive industry, car industry
Oct 11 2015
This is a translation of Bodo Wiegand’s latest newsletter, about Lean in Germany, followed by my comments:
Lately, I was at a company where the CEO told me “Mr. Wiegand, Lean is over – all the talk now is about Industry 4.0”. Well, I hadn’t seen this coming. Then:
- Lean would have been just a passing fad like many management theories.
- This company would already be Lean, with all the processes to be designed without waste.
So if Industry 4.0 takes over from Lean, we can say goodbye to the philosophy of creating value without waste, because that’s what Lean is about: creating value without waste.
By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 2 • Tags: Industrie 4.0, Industry 4.0, Lean
Oct 9 2015
Last week, in Paris, Philip Marris invited me to attend his seminar on Critical Chain Project Management, which I found enlightening. At the end of the day, Christian Hohmann asked me to sit with him for an interview that he posted on the Marris Consulting youtube channel. Warning: it’s in French.
By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: Industrie 4.0, Industry 4.0, Lean
Oct 7 2015
“Obeya” (大部屋) is Japanese for “Big room.” The term has been getting attention lately in the Lean community as a solution for service operations or project teams and is even conflated by some with production teams’ daily meetings on the shop floor, which don’t take place in a room other than the production shop itself.
On the other hand, the idea of bringing together in one room all the stakeholders in an issue, problem, or project to communicate face to face, find solutions and make decisions is not exactly new. It’s called a meeting, and those who wish to sound “Lean” without changing anything can call their meeting rooms “obeya.” Those who wish to dig deeper, however, find a more specific — and useful — concept, if not a panacea.
Contents
By Michel Baudin • Management • 1 • Tags: Lean, Obeya, Toyota, toyota product development
Oct 20 2015
Principles About Principles
Abstracting underlying principles from practices is essential when you are trying to learn from the way an organization works, for the purpose of helping other organizations, engaged in different activities in different contexts. Unless you can do it, you are reduced to just copying practices without understanding what problems they were intended to address.
Unfortunately, articulating a set of principles is hard because they must be (1) understood, (2) actionable, and (3) memorable. Here are a few meta-principles on how to achieve these goals:
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By Michel Baudin • Management • 3 • Tags: Lean Product Development, Principles, Toyota