1. James Surowiecki, “Better All the Time,” New Yorker, November 10, 2014.
2. “The Big Picture: HDTV and High-Resolution Systems,” Congress of the United States Office of Technology Assessment, Appendix A, 92.
3. Barnaby J. Feder, “Last U.S. TV Maker Will Sell Control to Koreans,” New York Times, July 18, 1995.
4. “Detroit Is Finally Closing the Car Quality Gap with Japan,” Associated Press, February 21, 2012, via Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/detroit-is-finally-closing-the-car-quality-gap-with-japan-2012-2.
5. Paul Akers, 2014 Lean Year End Message video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pidcXnnkfk.
6. W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 202.
7. Kettering University, http://paws.kettering.edu//~jhuggins/humor/quotes.html, accessed January 30, 2015.
8. I’ll explain PDSA in more detail later in this chapter.
9. Karen Martin, The Outstanding Organization (New York: McGraw Hill, 2012), 192–193.
10. Hubie Brown on Jordan, Michael Jordan Career Retrospective, National Basketball Association, http://www.nba.com/jordan/hubieonjordan.html, accessed January 30, 2015.
11. Taiichi Ohno, “Ask ‘Why’ Five Times About Every Matter,” Toyota Global website, http://www.toyota-global.com/company/toyota_traditions/quality/mar_apr_2006.html, accessed January 30, 2015.
12. John Shook, “How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUUMI,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2010.
13. Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, “The Irrational Side of Change Management,” McKinsey & Company, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/the_irrational_side_of_change_management.
14. Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins/.
15. Michael Ballé, “Products, People, Profits,” Industrial Engineer, October 2014.
16. See Mark’s KaiNexus webinars here: http://info.kainexus.com/webinar-download-leadership-behaviors, accessed February 2, 2015.
1. John A. Byrne, “Chainsaw Al,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 18, 1999, http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_42/b3651099.htm.
2. Tara Parker Pope, “The Fat Trap,” New York Times, December 28, 2011.
3. Suzanne Heywood, Dennis Layton, and Risto Penttinen, “A Better Way to Cut Costs,” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2009.
4. “Fit for Growth Index Profiler,” reported in Strategy& press release, June 17, 2014, www.strategyand.pwc.com/fit-for-growth-index-profiler.
5. Suzanne P. Nimocks, Robert L. Rosiello, and Oliver Wright, “Managing Overhead Costs,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2005.
6. Mark Graban, “The Little Difference That Turned ‘No Ideas’ Into ‘Lots of Ideas,’” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/little-difference-turned-ideas-lots-mark-graban.
1. A concise summary of this story is available at the Lean Voices blog: http://leanvoices.com/the-case-of-fujitsu-services-sense-and-respond-book-citation-by-bernard-marr/. More comprehensive treatments of the Fujitsu approach are available in Bernard Marr and Andy Neely’s Cranfield University case study (https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/bitstream/…/callcentreperformance.pdf), and in Susan Barlow, Stephen Parry, and Mike Faulkner’s book, Sense and Respond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
2. Allen C. Ward and Durward K. Sobek, Lean Product and Process Development (Cambridge, MA: Lean Enterprise Institute, 2014), 51.
3. I’ve provided just a tiny window into the remarkable work Menlo Innovations is doing. Read the full story in Rich’s book, Joy, Inc. (New York: Penguin Portfolio, 2013).
4. A “value stream” is the series of steps required to create, produce, and deliver a product or service to a customer. All organizations have value streams that serve external customers (e.g., cancer, trauma, and psychiatry value streams in a hospital; cleaning products, beauty products, and baby products value streams in a consumer packaged goods company), and value streams that serve internal customers (for example, hiring and onboarding, facilities, and IT).
1. Greg Bishop, “Tom Cruising,” Sports Illustrated, December 15, 2014, 88.
2. James Surowiecki, “Better All the Time,” New Yorker, November 10, 2014.
3. Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (Oxford University Press, 2003), 129.
4. All statistics from the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership, http://bit.ly/1A8TDex, accessed December 1, 2014.
5. Marc Onetto, “When Toyota Met E-Commerce: Lean at Amazon,” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2014.
6. M. L. Emiliani, “Standardized Work for Executive Leadership,” Leadership and Organization Development Journal 29, no. 1 (2008): 24–46.
7. Atul Gawande, “The Checklist,” New Yorker, December 10, 2007.
8. Dan Heath and Chip Heath, “Heroic Checklist,” Fast Company, February 14, 2008.
9. Paul Akers, Lean Year End Message 2014, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pidcXnnkfk.
10. Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, available for download at http://www.gallup.com/services/178517/state-global-workplace.aspx.
11. See Greenleaf’s essay, The Servant as Leader, for more information on this subject (https://www.leadershiparlington.org/pdf/TheServantasLeader.pdf).
12. Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso, “Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences108, no. 17 (April 26, 2011).
13. Michael Lewis, “In Meetings, on the Court to Discover ‘Obama’s Way,’” Fresh Air interview, September 12, 2012.
14. Peggy Orenstein, “Stop Your Search Engines,” New York Times, October 23, 2009.
1. Micheline Maynard, “‘The GM Nod’ and Other Cultural Flaws Exposed by the Ignition Defect Report,” Forbes, June 5, 2014.
2. Michael Ballé, Lead with Respect (Cambridge, MA: Lean Enterprise Institute, 2014), 34.
3. In 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter—cost for the hardware: $125 million; cost for the overall mission: $327 million—burned up as it began orbital insertion around Mars. The propulsion system overheated because the spacecraft dipped too deeply into the planet’s atmosphere. The story that made the headlines was that the error was due to a mismatch between imperial units and metric units: the Lockheed Martin engineering team used imperial units, NASA used metric, and someone failed to make the (very simple) conversion. Oops. After a full investigation, Carolyn Griner, retired deputy director of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, said that a simple, unanswered email about the correct measurement units with no follow-up resulted in the missed orbit. This is the story that should have made the headlines. (From a speech delivered at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, St. Louis Section, March 2001 dinner meeting.)
1. Geoff Colvin, Talent Is Overrated (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 134–5.
2. The concept of the four stages of competence or skill development is a mainstay of psychological theory. Developed by Noel Burch in the 1970s, it argues that people don’t know what they don’t know when they begin to acquire a skill. Once they advance enough to recognize their limitations, they practice their skills until they attain a level of competence. Finally, they can use the new skill without even thinking—becoming unconsciously competent. If you’ve ever taught a teenager how to drive (to say nothing of parking) a car, you’re probably painfully aware of these stages.
3. Atul Gawande, “Personal Best,” New Yorker, October 3, 2011.
4. Charles Fishman, “No Satisfaction at Toyota,” Fast Company, December 2006/January 2007.
5. Ben Shpigel, “Thanks to a Cerebral Influence, the Lions Find Enlightenment,” New York Times, December 20, 2014.
6. “The Toyota Way,” White Coat Black Art interview, CBC Radio, October 17, 2014, http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/White+Coat+Black+Art/Full+Episodes/ID/2559937050/.
7. Ken Iverson, Plain Talk (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 55.
8. Barry Wehmiller website, http://www.barrywehmiller.com/our-culture.
9. Jacob Stoller, The Lean CEO (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2015), 169–170.
10. Ibid, 172.
11. Christine Porath and Christine Pearson, “The Price of Incivility,” Harvard Business Review, January 2013.
12. Gawande, “Personal Best.”
13. Mike Rother, Toyota Kata (McGraw-Hill: New York, 2009).