I believe that leaders and leadership teams working together in a proper design will run the business more effectively than by hierarchical, command-and-control managing. But I can’t prove that. And there are no models. (Martin Bower) #TLSContinuum

“A relentless barrage of “why’s” is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo.  Use it often.” (Shingo)

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” (H. James Harrington)

When beginning the process of introducing solutions involve the customer in the discussions. Jack Welsh told us that “The best Six Sigma projects begin not inside the business but outside it, focused on answering the question – how can we make the customer more competitive?  What is critical to the customer’s success? …….One thing we […]

“The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” (Herman Schmidt) TLSContinuum 

“If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. “ (Albert Einstein) #TLSContinuum 

All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment a customer gives us an order to the point we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline in the value stream by removing non value-added wastes.” (Tachii Ohn)

“The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.” (Shigeo Shingo) #TLSContinuum

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing. (W. Edwards Deming) #TLSContinuum

It is impossible to improve any process until it is standardized. If the process is shifting from here to there, then any improvement will just be one more variation that is occasionally used and mostly ignored. One must standardize, and thus stabilize the process, before continuous improvement can be made.(Masaaki Ima)

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing… layout, processes, and procedures. (Marvin Bower) #TLSContinuum

A person and an organization must have goals, take actions to achieve those goals, gather evidence of achievement, study and reflect on the data and from that take actions again. Thus, they are in a continuous feedback spiral toward continuous improvement. This is what ‘Kaizan’ means (W. Edward Deming)

The message of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company (Masaaki Imai)

As Daniel Kahneman suggests in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, the human mind tends to take the easiest path when trying to resolve issues and make a decision. This never more true when we are trying to solve process problems. When your organization is faced with these problems the tendency is to either claim […]

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better (Jim Rohn) #TLSContinuum