Hurry Up and Wait! – Muri

[tweetmeme source="leanisgood" service="ow.ly"]“Hurry up and wait.”  That was our saying way back when I was a young, and spritely United States Marine.  Our standard practice was to arrive for everything really early then wait for something to happen, the Air Force people to let us board a plane, the Navy people to stick needles in us — the intent was to never be late, get done whatever we needed to get done, and move on (the hard part was occupying your Marines while they waited – they tend to be creative and biased towards action – if you don’t keep them busy they will either damage important government property

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It’s All About the Why, the Other Why

Photo by annnna. under Creative Commons Attribution

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The first thing that many lean practitioners think of when they hear the word ‘why’ is probably 5 why’s and getting to root cause of problems.  That is certainly a powerful tool and a good way to use ‘why’.  Those are the why’s that we don’t know.  As importantly we shouldn’t forget to teach the why’s that we do know.

Policy Deployment #2 – Command Goes Down, Control Goes Up

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Last week I posted about setting big goals for policy deployment.   Now that we have decided to “go to the moon” we need to get serious about figuring out exactly how.  Many people think that lean is a bottom up approach to business.  Think of it as being both top down and bottom up. 

Happy 234th Birthday Marines

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Semper Fidelis and happy birthday to all Marines,  born 234 years ago today – in a bar.

Lean Health Care – Humble Before People

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When I decided to blog I made a rule that I would NOT post on lean health care for two reasons: I have never done health care, it has only been done to me, and there are other blogs that are prolific and profound on the subject (here’s one.)  But rules were meant to be broken, right?

The story begins with Fred Holliday who goes to the ER for pain in his lower chest / back.  It turns out