Lean Blog

AI Didn’t Invent Lean Slop. It Learned It From Us.

Mark Graban — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:48:56 +0000

I have been seeing more AI-generated Lean infographics on LinkedIn lately. So many. It's annoying. I try not being annoyed, but it's hard. So, I made one of my own about the trend and posted it on LinkedIn. It collects six confident, wrong claims of the kind that fill these graphics. Call it Lean slop. When I see claims like those, the wrongness jumps out. What gets me is how familiar every one of them […]

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Admitting Mistakes Is Not Enough: The Leadership Lesson Behind the Burger King and Domino’s Ads

Mark Graban — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:41:00 +0000

TL;DR: Burger King, T-Mobile, and Domino's have all built ad campaigns around the same confession: our product was bad, but it's better now. The marketing is interesting. The leadership lesson is better. In each case, the harsh verdict comes from a customer rather than the brand's own scorecard, and the apology only works because the company fixed the underlying problem first. The same pattern applies inside any organization trying to build psychological safety. Admitting mistakes […]

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You’re Not Hiring Talent. You’re Renting It.

Mark Graban — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:31:31 +0000

You finally found the perfect hire. The one who did this exact job, at a company just like yours, for six years. No training required. You felt the relief of it. Someone who already knows the work, who can start Monday and contribute by Friday. Six months later, you notice something. They still speak about problems, and solve them, the way their old company did. They reach for habits you've spent years trying to move […]

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What Toyota’s 1992 Booklet Says About Stopping the Line, and What It Leaves to You

Mark Graban — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:02:30 +0000

Picking up the thread from the previous post on Toyota's April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” This one's about the line-stop rope or andon cord. The booklet describes the mechanism with care. From the jidoka section: “The ‘fixed-position stop system' is a classic example of jidoka. In that system, a worker anywhere on the assembly line who notices an abnormality can stop the production flow by pulling on a rope overhead or by pushing […]

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First, We Develop the People

Mark Graban — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:51:00 +0000

A lunch, a hand gesture, and the question most Lean implementations are answering backwards. The gesture is the whole thing. The late Hajime Oba held his hands out in front of him, palms down, one higher than the other. “All the other consultants and managers implement solutions down on the people doing the work. What they don't understand is the work always changes in unpredictable, even unknowable ways underneath them.” Then he repositioned. Palms up. […]

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Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: May 29, 2026

Ryan McCormack — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:25:22 +0000

Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better. The real risk of easy AI answers isn't that the tools surpass us, but that we lose the slow, uncertain exploration that makes answers stick and curiosity possible. When answers are this cheap, the […]

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What Do You Know? And How Do You Know It?

Mark Graban — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:54:00 +0000

Two questions from a few Toyota mentors — and the Deming idea behind them. You can usually feel it before you can name it. The improvement meeting that used to feel alive is now… polite. People show up. They nod at the right moments. The countermeasures get committed to (or so it seems) and the metrics get reported, and somewhere in the room, the patience has thinned in a way it didn't used to. It […]

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Jeff Liker, Twenty Years Later: The Ideas That Keep Showing Up

Mark Graban — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:11:00 +0000

In 2006, I started this podcast. Jeff Liker was guest number 3, in August of that year. He has been back on seven more episodes since, which makes him one of the most frequent guests this show has ever had. For the latest episode, I pulled clips from across those conversations going back almost twenty years. Listening through them again, what stood out was how much hasn't changed. The lean tools are better known now. […]

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