Four Quick Stories of Lean

Here are four useful illustrations of Lean I've come across in the past week.

A Lean Barber Shop? Yes, indeed. My thanks to my friend and alert reader Brian McCorry for this story, derived from recent Wall Street Journal reports of a lean barber shop. Note how many lean tools this entrepreneur used.

Lean Product Development. Thanks to my colleage Ken Kellams, we discover no less a prestigious group than McKinsey & Company producing this paper on product development using standard Lean tools. Eliminating batch and pursuing flow in product development?? Yes, indeed.

Lean means changes and how we manage change governs how well (or even if) we can transform. For a delightful look at managing change check out this blog by Jeff Angus. His key point:

As in most smart efforts to squeeze out process time, you start with waste. And in a human-intensive process like baseball, you don't try to wrench it out all at once -- you tweak, see what happens, repeat.

Tom Peters Group walks the talk as I found out this week. On Tuesday, I got an email notice of an early purchase opportunity of Tom's new book. Wanting to take advantage of the offer, I clicked on the Tom Peters Group link. But, for some reason, the page wouldn't load and I couldn't execute the request via the web. I noted a toll-free number and called it.

• I encountered the most appealing and friendly voice mail greeting I've ever heard. Try it yourself at 1.888.221.8685 if you are in the United States.
• I pressed the right number to talk to a human. Explained my web problem and she happily took my order over the phone...without getting transferred again.
• This morning, exactly 48 hours later, I had the two books on my desk here in Indiana.

The experience was, in a word, remarkable. And, I'm telling you about it.

On top of all this, my mind is racing from all I saw yesterday at Toyota. Stay tuned for more on that subject.

I hope this is helpful. And, that you will make your own lean stories.

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