Wednesday this week I wrapped up three interesting days attending and speaking at the LESS 2011 conference in Stockholm. I arrived on Sunday morning via Oslo, and was one of just four people who attended the informal community event at noon that day. Haakan Forss, Al Shalloway, Karl Scotland, and I had a nice discussion [...]
Archive | Blog RSS feed for this section
Impressions from LKCE 2011 in Munich
I’m just wrapping up after attending and speaking at Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 in Munich. All in all, it was a great conference. The organizer, it-Agile with Arne Roock and Bernd Schiffer and the other great people helping out, did a great job. They also demonstrated great creativity. The conference venue was an old [...]
Are you going somewhere worth going?
We know (see Daniel Pink’s TED talk) that employees are motivated by personal growth, autonomy, and being connected to a bigger purpose. Leaders can provide a continuous learning experience through challenging projects, training, and by supporting Kaizen. They can also grant more autonomy to teams. In technology companies this is pretty much necessary to get anything [...]
Impressions from Lean SSC 2011
I spent most of last week attending and speaking at the 2011 Lean Software and Systems Consortium conference in Long Beach, California. It was an interesting experience to say the least. I often talk about Lean as providing an operating system, an organizational learning system, and a people development system. While the Lean Software Development [...]
Beyond Value Streams: Business Systems
The models we use to describe the world impact how we see it and how we reflect on what we see. Our models also shape our thinking about what might be improved and how. Just consider the impact of military strategy and sports on business thinking. When we began our mission to bring Lean to [...]
Is your organization learning-impaired?
Your organization’s long-term success depends on six core capabilities: Perception: How accurately it sees itself and the world around it Innovation: How effectively it creates ideas for new products and services Execution: How efficiently it executes and delivers value to the customer Persuasion: Telling its story to shareholders, employees, and customers in a compelling manner [...]
Lean Light?
Last week the CEO of a client in Europe told me about his presentation of a Kanban board for a sales value stream to a bunch of his product development folks. They are only six months now into their Lean journey, but this is a company where the Chairman as well as the CEO have [...]
Surviving the Recession: It’s Back to Basics
As we enter what looks like a global recession, business leaders are scrambling to cope with significant and sudden changes. Credit is in short supply, demand is slowing, sales cycles are increasing, and employees’ confidence is eroding. Their concern is understandable. Here in the U.S., the unemployment rate is expected to reach double digits before [...]
What’s a manager to do?
A young friend of mine, Amber, just got promoted to manage a customer support team for a satellite company. Amber described her team as frustrated by seemingly conflicting goals, including spending less time on each call while improving the resolution rate. Team members would keep improving in one area while compromising in another. Most of [...]
Impressions from BAE Systems Lean Exchange Summit
I am at the San Jose airport waiting to board my flight back to San Diego. It has been an interesting trip up to Silicon Valley as usual. This week I attended the first annual Lean conference of BAE Systems. BAE is a global $27B aerospace & defense enterprise with 96,000 employees in a dozen [...]