Lean Blog by Mark Graban

Toyota’s 1992 View: Standardized Work and Kaizen Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

Mark Graban — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:04:00 +0000

Most Lean programs treat standardized work and kaizen as opposites. Standardized work is the rigid part. Kaizen is the creative part. One constrains, the other improves. Pick whichever side you prefer and argue with the other camp at the next conference. The 1992 Toyota booklet doesn't see them as opposites. It sees them as parts of the same activity cycle, carried out by the same people and connected through the same standards. Standardized work establishes […]

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A Kaizen Board in Japan, and a Manager Who Answered Every Sheet

Mark Graban — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:20:00 +0000

The kaizen board held a couple dozen sheets. Each one numbered, each one stamped “jisshi-zumi” — already done. A board full of carried-out improvements is a strong sign in any factory, in any country. But that wasn't the part that caught me. What caught me was the handwriting at the bottom of every single sheet. I saw this on Katie Anderson's Japan Leadership Experience in 2024, at one of the manufacturing companies we visited. The […]

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Toyota’s $20-an-Idea Experiment–and the Risk of Fixing the Wrong Problem

Mark Graban — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:26:00 +0000

Twenty years ago this month, I recorded the first episode of Lean Blog Interviews. My guest was Norman Bodek, who spent decades studying Toyota and introducing American audiences to the work of people, including Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo. I'm sharing a video excerpt from that conversation because the story still holds up–and because I think about it whenever a client asks how much they should pay employees for improvement ideas. Here's the story Bodek […]

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What the First Twelve Years of Writing About Sports Taught Me About Leadership

Mark Graban — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:22:00 +0000

I've been pulling together a slightly updated edition of my eBook collecting the sports-related posts from this blog. The earliest post in it is from October 2005. The most recent is from January 2017. Going back through twelve years of my own writing was a strange experience. Some of it I don't remember writing. Some of it I'd write differently now. And some of it surprised me by holding up better than I expected. What […]

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20 Years Of Lean Podcasting, Thanks to Norman Bodek

Mark Graban — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:13:00 +0000

Twenty years ago, on July 16, 2006, the Lean Blog Podcast began with a conversation with Norman Bodek. Norman was my friend and mentor–and the person who suggested that I start doing audio interviews in the first place. What began with his idea has now grown to 547 episodes. To mark the podcast's 20th anniversary, this bonus episode revisits highlights from that original conversation. Norman discusses Quick and Easy Kaizen, employee suggestion systems, respect for […]

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A Bending Column, a Bad Answer, and the Real Test of a Speak-Up Culture

Mark Graban — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:27:49 +0000

Sean Dow was on the 22nd floor of a Manhattan high-rise last week, working on the building's sprinkler system, when he noticed something wrong with the concrete slab: cracks where cracks don't belong. The building is Pfizer's former headquarters on East 42nd Street, now being converted from offices into roughly 1,600 apartments. The enormous redevelopment includes adding floors to part of the complex, making this far more than a cosmetic renovation. Dow went down a […]

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We Thought We Solved That: The Art and Judgment Calls in the PDSA Cycle

Mark Graban — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 09:49:37 +0000

An executive says, after hearing about a major quality defect: “You said we solved that. Why'd the problem come back???” That might sound like an attempt at accountability. But it's not necessarily Lean thinking. The “Study” step of the Plan-Do-Study-Adjust cycle is supposed to help us learn from what happened. Did the countermeasure work as expected? Did the process change? Did we misunderstand the cause? Did the old condition return because the system made it […]

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The First Three Seconds After Someone Admits a Mistake

Mark Graban — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:09:32 +0000

Someone walks into your office and says, “We have a problem.” Notice what your body does before your brain catches up. A small tightening. A breath you take to steady yourself. Maybe your face does something you didn't authorize. All of this happens in the first second, before you've heard a single fact about what the problem actually is. That involuntary half-second is the most honest thing about your leadership, and the person standing in […]

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