Lean Roundup #129 – February 2020

A selection of highlighted blog posts from Lean bloggers from the month of February 2020.  You can also view the previous monthly Lean Roundups here.

How Lean Deployment Is Like Working with Two-Part Epoxy – Jon Miller shares some notable similarities between working with two-part epoxies and the successful deployment of Lean management into organizations.

Be Careful With Misleading Year-Over-Year Charts – Mark Graban discusses the difficulty with YOY charts may cause with misleading conclusions about performance.

Tool Boards 101 – Tony Manos shares five tips for selecting the right tool board.

Management IQ – Bob Emiliani talks about the management practices, research, training, and teaching to raise the management intelligence quotient (IQ) of those changed with leading organizations.

The Myth of the Natural Born Leader – Jeff Hajek talks about the skills of a leader and explains that they can be learned.

Leverage Learning Environments to Create Customer Value – Kevin Meyer talks about how to unleash the knowledge and creativity of your people, combine it with the experience and perspective of other leaders, and use rigorous learning, problem-solving, and innovation processes to create value for your customers.

Just the Facts, Ma'am - Dan Markovitz explains the importance of gathering data and facts to understand the full picture.

What is a Key Thinker? – Pascal Dennis discusses the rare qualities of a key thinker and how we can develop more key thinkers.

Your Mantra For Effective Outcomes – Jamie Flinchbaugh reveals a coaching phrase that has helped him lead teams to the most effective outcomes in all pursuits. The phrase is “it’s more important to be effective than right.”

How Mindfulness Practices Enable Lean Culture – Jon Miller shares several ways that mindfulness practices enable Lean thinking, behavior and ultimately the culture.

Must Dos and Nice to Haves: Performance Reviews and Continuous Improvement? – Mark Graban asks if you are freeing up time for improvement or are you making Lean, Kaizen, or other continuous improvement methods into a hated mandatory activity, just like budgeting or annual reviews?

The Value of A Visual Schedule is Developing Shared Understanding - Katrina Appell talks about collaboration tools for engineers tasks with problem solving.

Respect for People Means Taking Care with Your Questions - Karen Gaudet discusses the importance of leaders to ask questions when you seek to understand a certain problem or situation.

Ask Art: What Are the Most Important Management Changes Needed to Implement A Lean Turnaround? – Art Byrne says becoming a lean enterprise is a lot of work and takes time and unless you change the way management behaves, you have almost no chance of getting there.