Month: December 2008

If you are providing your Customers with a W.O.W. experience, you will know it. If you are not, you will know it as well.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how the Toyota Production System was developed. Unlike those of us who have books, websites, and training programs in abundance, Toyota engineers took their process of assembly-line manufacture of automobiles and created, in incremental steps, the methodology that’s now known as Lean. It took shape over a […]

“Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you’ll get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost” – H. Thomas Johnson Those of you who are Deming fans may liken this quote to Deming’s admonition that “the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown […]

This is just for fun and to win a real prize you need to have been very good all year and have a generous expense account. Good old Santa wants to give you a Christmas present. He’s checked if you have been naughty or nice and the news is not good, so you have to […]

Well, it’s time for my annual Christmas Blog! With apologies to Charles Dickens, here is my adapted version of his “Ghost Story of Christmas” (first published in 1843). ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Stave 1: Muda’s Ghost The workers at the Shusendo & Muda Company are very busy being highly productive. The boss, Ebenezer Shusendo, only gives performance bonuses […]

I got this from a friend and decided to share it with my friends at Six Sigma. I thought this might represent the process many use when they don’t plan. Just get the job done. Don’t worry about process or structure or planning. Just do it. Hm…. You think a value stream map would help? […]

Last year iSixSigma Magazine ran a cover story on PointRoll and the beginnings of their Six Sigma initiative. PointRoll, a leading online ad agency, is a small company by Fortune 500 revenue standards (less than 100 million in revenue) and even smaller Six Sigma company by Six Sigma standards (1 Black Belt and 7 Green […]

We’ve all seen the “resistance curve” where a few people are innovators, some are early adopters, early and late majorities, and a few are laggards, or skeptics, or what-have-you (from the work of Everett Rogersand other researchers). One way to get almost everyone to be an early adopter is to offer something of value – […]

NewPage Corp. is the cover story in the November/December 2008 issue of iSixSigma Magazine. “From its inception three years ago, NewPage planned to make Lean Six Sigma an integral part of how the company was run. The paper producer is using the methodology to connect its amalgam of mills in a common culture and to […]