When I first listened to  Mike George’s Stong America Now program (BTW: Michael George will be appearing on the Lean Blog Podcast later this week.), I thought it was kind of a joke that hardly made sense. However, I have learned to investigate things that rub me the wrong way initially and many times I have found a little gold in the outcomes.

One of those outcomes was the opportunity to interview Hundley Elliotte one of the authors of, Building High Performance Government Through Lean Six Sigma: A Leader's Guide to Creating Speed, Agility, and Efficiency. What I liked about the book was it really removes the issues about can it be done, it is already being done. In the podcast we discussed these places and also discussed the how in applying Lean Six Sigma to any public organization. In fact, I found certain parts of the book remarkably useful  for the private sector. Very well written book without the statistical jargon so often found in Lean Six Sigma books. The authors paint a very clear picture of the role of Lean Six Sigma in Government.

Hundley M. Elliotte is the global lead for the Process Performance group within the Accenture Process & Innovation Performance service line. He has more than 15 years of consulting experience, focusing on managing business value, setting strategy, identifying customer needs, and identifying and implementing improvement opportunities in diverse business sectors. Previously, Mr. Elliotte worked for more than a decade in the corporate sector, holding sales, marketing and general management positions with a leading pulp and paper manufacturer and with a plastics company. He is based in Atlanta.

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 223,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries.

Read Chapter One, “Building the Anatomy for High Performance”

Read about the Accenture Institute for Health and Public Service.

Related Information:

DMAIC, DMADV, Lean, Six Sigma for Government?

Lean Six Sigma for Government

Lean Six Sigma will increase effectiveness of Stimulus spending

The Hell with the Economic Stimulus Package – I’ll Lead

Balancing Internal and External Lean Six Sigma Consulting Roles

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (382)

Steven C. Wilson founded Wilson Consulting and Training Services,Inc (WCTS, Inc) as a process improvement consulting firm.  He has dedicated himself to this cause by training over 600 Six Sigma practitioners in over 70 companies in the state of Iowa. His training focuses on quality to  include  Lean, Theory of Constraints, Supply chain, Problem Solving and  Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt  training. Recently, he has developed new approaches to a blended learning platform and is piloting them in his Leadership and Data-Driven Problem Solving Courses. In the podcast with Steve, I came away with a feeling that he looks at his practice more from a training perspective than consulting.

Steve to me is the epitome of today’s successful consultant. He acts as a in-house consultant for a major healthcare facility in the Des Moines, Iowa area, instructs at many of the Iowa Community Colleges, conducts Green Belt and Black Belt training for industry and hosts the Blog Talk Radio Show, Quality Conversations. As a result of this, he speaks on a regular basis throughout the state and has even presided as the Master of Ceremonies at a national iSixSigma Live event. Steve has more offline touch-points than most of us have online touch-points. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I am adamant that most business is still done with a handshake. It seems to me that Steve shakes as many hands as a politician and in Iowa there are a lot of hands shaken.

Another unique aspect of Wilson Consulting and Training Services is Steve’s  20 years of experience has been primarily in the service industry.  With this background, he offers a unique perspective, even for the more traditional quality venues such as manufacturing.  With all industries focusing more and more on the service aspect applying quality improvement tools to this area is typically the quickest ROI an organization can receive.

Related Information:

Steve’s website: Wilson Consulting and Training Services,

Marketing your Black Belt

Sustaining Lean using Continuous Improvement: The Toyota Way

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (334)

On the Business901 podcast, Lindsay Jackson Nichols discussed the business benefits of ISO Certification and how it can be used in conjunction with continuous improvement. Lindsay is the CEO of MOCG, a management consulting firm specializing in implementing process improvement and ISO based management systems. 

When you first think about, you may think that Quality Management and a continuous improvement methodology like Lean are one in the same. You may also think that they are willing partners. Many disagree with that thought. My thoughts are that I find the ISO standards as a way to involve people from all departments to ask them how you do things. As a result, procedures and documentation are created to evaluate the current method of doing things (the first step in standard work) against the requirements of a standard (ISO).  As a result, you develop performance gaps for continuous improvement. Others believe that this would hinder the development and flexibility of standard work documents and prefer that they are divorced from each other.

I probed this question with Lindsay and on a Lean Blog Post on Standard Work. The answer I believe to be correct is that ISO 9001 should not be the continuous improvement strategy just that it should be one metric by which continuous improvement is measured. However, I still believe using ISO as a standard to start the process of developing standard work is not a bad place to start.

About LJ Nichols: Lindsay’s career has been entirely devoted to management consulting, working with Grant Thornton LLP - the fifth largest accounting and management consulting firm in the nation, assisting them develop a ‘center of excellence’ for their quality, environment and regulatory practice, and P-E International plc/P-E Handley Walker the largest management consulting firm in Europe, where she was integral in establishing their ISO presence in the US.

Related Information:

Agreeing on Standards in a Lean Enterprise

Is Standard Work needed in Sales and Marketing?

Where is the path in Continuous Improvement for Sales and Marketing?

Why does sales and marketing operate to a different quality standard?

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (464)

James Franz is the co-author with Jeffrey K. Liker on the latest of the Toyota Way books:The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement: Linking Strategy and Operational Excellence to Achieve Superior Performance . Jim was my guest on the Business901 podcast and if you have been spending your time improving your processes and wondering why they are not giving you the expected returns, this is the podcast for you.

James Franz has over 24 years of manufacturing experience and learned lean as a Toyota Production Engineer in Japan. He started at the Motomachi plant and then moved to NUMMI and then finally worked in Georgetown, Kentucky. After leaving Toyota, he then went to Ford to apply his lean knowledge beginning in production engineering. He was sent to Ford of Australia for 3 years and led their Stamping, Assembly, Casting, and Powertrain facilities to global leadership in lean for Ford. Jim also teaches for the University of Michigan’s Center for Professional Development’s Lean Certification course.

About the Toyota Way Academy: The Academy’s mission is to teach the Toyota Way using the Toyota Way for more information visit: www.toyotawayacademy.com

Related Information:

Coaching Lean eBook with Dr. Liker

Dr. Jeff Liker on PDCA and Lean Culture>

PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (626)

Listen to Dr. Womack discuss Lean in the 2nd part of a 2 part podcast. Part 1 of the podcast was A Gemba Talk with Womack on Lean. We discussed his new book Gemba Walks and many of the problems in implementing Lean. Just the intro and ending was repeated. About 2 minutes on each end.

Other Books by Dr. Womack:

Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation

Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together

The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production

Related Information:

Lean is the tool that Creates the Customer Relationship

Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing …

PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation

Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (494)

These questions may get answered for you when you listen to this podcast.

• Do you think Lean can be applied to Sales and Marketing?
• Do you think Sales and Marketing departments resist becoming Lean?
• How important is Lean to Sales and Marketing?
• Or, how important is Sales and Marketing to Lean?

Erik Haberkern, a General Sales Manger of a global Fortune 300 chemical company discusses the application of Lean in Sales sand Marketing. Eric first worked as a Facility Manager and soon became a Lean Deployment Manager. He transferred those skills to Sales and Marketing. Eric’s credentials are best described in comments by his colleagues:

• Erik is a true professional in every sense of the word! He helped complete the most successful acetylene Lean project at the Roseville, MN facility.
• Erik's leadership skills are second to none, and he uses these skills to motivate and inspire the people around him. He also understands how to work within a team, to get the most out of the people, and to utilize their strengths in the role to which they belong.
• Among his greatest strengths are his abilities to work with people at all levels within an organization, effective leadership style in motivating others to deliver results, and his promotion of accountability through taking action.

As you listen to the podcast, you can see how true these comments are. Erik follows a very structured team approach in implementing Lean filled with a whole bunch of We’s and few if any I’s, a consummate team player. Eric can be found on LinkedIn.

Related Information:

How to develop a Survey to capture Voice of Market

Can you really use Lean for Marketing? – Dr. Balle

The Future of Marketing is Lean

Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing …

PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation

Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (460)

I had the pleasure of discussing the mission and expertise of the Juran Institute, Inc. with their CEO, Joe DeFeo. The Institute provides research and pragmatic solutions to enable organizations from any industry to lean the tools and techniques for managing quality and performance excellence. As a result of this discussion, I think you will take away some different views on the subject of quality and how they apply to your organization. This is not quality for the sake of quality. This is quality for the sake of business improvement. 

The Juran's Quality Handbook: The Complete Guide to Performance Excellence 6/e , was co-authored by Joe DeFeo and the late Dr. Joseph M. Juran. This authoritative resource shows how to apply universal methods for delivering superior results and organizational excellence in any organization, industry, country or process. In the podcast, Joe will give two people the opportunity to win a copy of the handbook.

P.S. What do you talk about before a podcast begins? I left some beginning remarks. I have to correct our statement in the beginning,  WKRP was in Cincinnati.

Upcoming Events: Juran is conducting blended Lean Six Sigma workshops for Green Belt and Black Belt certification beginning in April 2011. The workshops begin with required online independent study of e-learning modules. The estimated 24 hours of independent study must be completed by the start of the onsite, instructor-led portion of the workshop. The onsite workshop training, held in Southbury, Connecticut, will expand upon the topics covered in the e-learning modules. Training will be interactive with group case study exercises, problem analysis and statistics practice. Here is a list of all the workshops Juran currently has scheduled for 2011:

• Lean Six Sigma Blended Green Belt - (Beginning April 4, 2011)
• Lean Six Sigma Blended Black Belt - (Beginning April 4, 2011)
• Lean Six Sigma Upgrade to Black Belt - (Beginning May 2, 2011)

To register, or for more information, please call 800-338-7726, or email Tina@juran.com.

Related Information:

Juran Institute Website

ASQ Columbus Spring Conference will host Marketing with Lean

Need to grow by innovation, consider the little i versus the big I.

Integrating Value Networks

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Why does sales and marketing operate to a different quality standard?

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (479)

Dr. Jeff Liker celebrated author and authority on Toyota and the Toyota Production System was my guest on the Business901 podcast and we discussed his upcoming book, The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement (Book release date is May 13th).

Dr. Liker in comparing Lean and Six Sigma:

Sometimes, I've heard people say Six Sigma is more sophisticated, and it's like the graduate school for the tougher problems that require advanced statistics; and Lean is more common sense and practical, and more quick and dirty. That's not the way I look at it all. But the tool that you see with Lean is something like the Kanban system. You have a card and you write information, and you decide what the maximum and minimum is. And when you reach the minimum, you send the card. That's a very simple production and inventory control system compared to a linear program that is on the cputer; you put in all sorts of data and you optimize the schedule.

Here, you've got these cards, and people are just counting cards, and it seems very primitive. But the reason why these tools are so simple is because Toyota wants the people who are actually doing the work to see the problems as they occur. They want them to solve them in real‑time, one by one, as they come up, instead of allowing problems to accumulate, and then, perhaps once a year, once in three years, do a big, deep dive project and you're basically trying to solve three years of accumulated problems.

So the tools and techniques are intentionally very simple, a trend chart, not regression analysis.

Admittedly, there may be some loss of precision, because we don't know if it's statistically significant or not, but what we're doing is lots and lots of little problem‑solving cycles, and we're learning by direct observation. Because you can see it and touch it, people who are actively engaged at the workplace can understand it.

So it's by definition the tools are very visual and very easy to understand.

And Dr. Liker went on to say:

So, we're constantly looking for the next thing without realizing that we already had it to begin with, whether it was total quality management or a continuous program or A3s or DMAIC, whatever it was. The underlying PDCA concept was there to begin with, but we didn't continue.

We didn't have what Deming called "Stability of purpose," and we focused on the tool and deploying the tool instead of developing the culture, so that PDCA became a way of thinking and a way of living rather than a program.

Professor Liker is the author of The Toyota Way Fieldbook which is one my favorite and most quoted books. His most recent work, Toyota Under Fire a 2011 Shingo Prize Winner, takes you beyond the headlines and into the offices and factories of Toyota to reveal the truth behind the company's highly publicized and controversial recall of over 10 million vehicles.

Professor Liker’s Company Website: Optiprise

Related Information:

Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing

PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

The differences in Lean and Agile

Continuously improving thru PDCA

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (543)

The Systems2win Company provides business process improvement tools and training to companies all over the globe. People are provided with easy-to-use fill-in-the-blanks Excel templates that come with self-help online training to improve the speed and reduce the cost of every step of your project. Dean was my guest on the podcast and we discussed how his company lives to their tag line. “Continuously improving tools for continuous improvement”. It is a unique discussion on how a small company practices PDCA.

Sytems2win will be exhibiting at the 23rd Annual Shingo Prize Conference, March 28 – April 1, 2011 – Northern Kentucky Convention Center located near Cincinnati, OH.

Systems2win templates were originally developed during 14 years of manufacturing systems consulting by the founder of Systems2win, Dean Ziegler. Systems2win templates and online training has been field proven, and continues to be continuously improved by hundreds of Systems2win software users.

Systems2win website: http://Systems2/win.com

Systems2win Newsletter

Related Information:

PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation

VSM Guiding Principles

A3 Problem Solving for Marketing

Value Stream Mapping differs in Lean Marketing

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (489)

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Liker, celebrated author and authority on Toyota and the Toyota Production System. I was interviewing Jeff about his upcoming book, The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement (Book release date is April 22nd, Podcast will be later this month) and we wandered off on the question of coaching and teaching which Professor Liker knows a little about. As a result, I ended up with about 22 minutes of recording about Learning Lean. Information that is suited both for the Lean Consultant and the organization starting Lean or trying to take Lean to the next level.

An excerpt from the podcast:

It takes a certain type of person to be able to bring themselves back and relate to the beginner, and remember what I had to learn five years ago. There are some people who just can't do that. They can do it and they don't understand, or get frustrated when others can't understand what they understand. That's another kind of important issue, is that teaching is different than doing. Very often we just assume. For example, somebody is a Black Belt and they do enough projects they become Master Black Belt. And now presumably they can teach. That's not a good assumption.

P.S. Professor Liker is the author of The Toyota Way Fieldbook which is in my top 5 dog-eared, highlighted, crimped pages and written in margin books that I own. Another words, I recommend it!

Professor Liker’s Company Website: Optiprise

Related Posts:

Ask not what sales can do for you, ask what you can do for sales!

The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota

The Lean Edge and Zen – 2 great topics discovered

Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing …

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (500)

Jim ("Cope") Coplien was my guest on the Business901 podcast. We discussed his new book,Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development but I found Cope’s view on Lean and Agile quite interesting. His knowledge of the subject goes far beyond the software practices that he writes about. Whether you are in IT or not, I think this podcast really helps in understanding Lean as a methodology.

Cope is a speaker and author whose works range from programming and architecture to ethnography and organizational design. He is a founder of the Software Pattern discipline and of organizational patterns, which in turn were one of the foundations of Scrum. Though he writes for a technical audience, his works focus on the human element of product development. His latest work, "Lean Architecture" is as much about how architecture helps make software usable, as it is about software maintainability on the technical side.

Other books:

Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development

Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms

Related Posts:

The differences in Lean and Agile

Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA

Should you Manage your Organization with Agile Techniques?

PDCA Cycle introduction to Lean Marketing

Profound knowledge for Lean Marketing

Apply Lean thinking to Sales and Marketing

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (708)

Mike Osterling, who is the President and Principal Consultant at Osterling Consulting was my guest on the Business901 podcast and our discussion centered around A3 problem solving and A3 thinking. Mike is a long-term Lean Practitioner and it is interesting on his initial comment in the podcast when I asked, What he has been doing since I last talked to him? 

Mike said, “Its been interesting because I've been reengaging with some clients and moving on from a lot of the traditional Lean tools, whether they're being applied in office environment or of a shop floor and going to what they're perceiving as advance concepts. So that's exactly in line with what we want to talk about today; problem solving and A3 thinking. So it's been a good journey and what I think is done in a normal evolution of thought and development.”

Osterling Consulting was founded by Mike Osterling in 2000 with the purpose of supporting organizations on their continuous improvement journey. Building upon 18 years of internal experience in operations leadership roles, Mike has worked full time for the last 13 years applying the lean concepts in manufacturing and office environments.

Mike is also the co-author of The Kaizen Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service and Technical Environments. a practical, how-to guide for planning, executing, and sustaining rapid improvements in office, service, and technical environments. Geared to continuous improvement professionals and leadership teams, this book provides the methodology and practical tools for generating measurable results, while building a motivated workforce and creating a culture with an integrated focus on customer value, quality, cost, and service. Mike is an expert facilitator for a Kaizen event, contact him through his website www.mosterling.com

Sample A3 is available on the Business901 blog post on this Podcast.

Related Posts:

Kaizen in the Office Environment

Lean Office Kaizen Event Ebook

Kaizen: Marketing Inside your Organization

Problem Solving

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (614)