IIE Blogs

When I present about this to healthcare audiences, I typically challenge the audience to keep their eyes open today ... how many warnings, cautions and "be carefuls" can you find?

... Starbucks has a reputation for hiring pretty educated people as baristas given their health benefits and all. So it seems like a huge opportunity to engage those employees in each and every Starbucks location (how many?) in kaizen, sharing those improvements across locations.

... This one-time investment of "unsubscribe me" time will pay off day after day, week after week. My inbox will be less cluttered and I'll waste less time deleting e-mails I don't read.

Bonnell's Fine Texas Cuisine is an outstanding local restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas, that focuses on local food and wild game. Chef Jon Bonnell is highly rated and is written up in many publications. ... read more 

Clients of mine always end up saying something like "Lean really gets into your head... it's hard to turn off" ... read more 

Here's an interesting example of "Everyday Lean" that I never knew about. Have you ever been frustrated by pulling on a roll of aluminum foil (or plastic wrap) and having the roll pop out of the container?...read more 

I'm just thrilled anytime I see an example of an airline making a process improvement...read more 

De-Clutter with a Six-Month "Maybe Box" 
 
The site "lifehacker" is one of my favorite blogs. While not about "lean" per se, there's often a great deal of overlap between personal productivity and lean concepts ... read more 

In the course of my consulting work, I'm sometimes asked something like, "OK, so do you use this stuff at home? Do you 5S your kitchen and your garage?"...read more 

After Christmas, having some time at home led to some puttering around the house and what eventually turned into a full-blown home 5S activity. My wife and I were motivated by two things: 1) we received some new kitchen gadgets as gifts, which meant we needed to find room for them and 2) a recognition that the refrigerator had gotten pretty nasty inside...read more