Lean Blog

What Toyota Said About Their Own Production System in 1992

Mark Graban — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:41:00 +0000

Somewhere along the way in my career, someone handed me a copy of “The Toyota Production System,” published by Toyota Motor Corporation in April 1992. I don't remember who gave it to me. The document itself is unassuming – a horizontal-format booklet from Toyota's International Public Affairs Division, written for outside audiences who wanted to understand what Toyota was actually doing. I pulled it back out recently and read it cover to cover. What struck […]

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Chad Diggs on Building Quality Systems, Not Heroes

Mark Graban — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:21:16 +0000

Why do so many quality programs fall apart the moment the firefighter walks out the door? In this conversation, Chad Diggs talks about his new book, Below the Surface, and what it takes to build quality systems that outlast the people who built them. Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #544 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Chad Diggs, a quality management professional, consultant, author, and founder of DIQ […]

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Beyond Cheerleaders and Doomers: A Poll on AI in Lean Work

Mark Graban — Tue, 19 May 2026 13:27:28 +0000

The public conversation about AI is dominated by cheerleaders and doomers. Both camps are loud. Neither is very useful when you're trying to decide whether to use AI on a Monday morning. Most working Lean people I talk to sit somewhere quieter than either camp. They've tried things. They've kept some, dropped others. They have a short list of things they won't use AI for at all. They're not impressed by demos and they're not […]

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What Ingvar Kamprad’s Challengers Meant, and Why IKEA Displays Its Mistakes

Mark Graban — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:49:00 +0000

“Challengers” A college friend of mine sent me a photo from Oslo recently. He'd spotted a display about IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad and his “challengers” just outside the Nobel Peace Prize Center and the National Museum, and sent the translation along with it. The line that grabbed me first: “Don't break the rules, just stretch them a bit.” That's apparently how Kamprad described people like designer Gillis Lundgren — the man pictured in the photo […]

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Deming’s Long Shadow: Twenty Years of Conversations

Mark Graban — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:40:00 +0000

Mike Stoecklein recalls a story secondhand. It was, he thinks, at one of the last four-day seminars W. Edwards Deming ever gave. Deming was frail by then. Someone later told Mike that when the seminar got to the Red Bead Experiment, Deming stood up slowly in front of the executives in the room and said something like: “Young Jerry Stoecklein, nine years old, he understands the lessons of the red beads. Why can't you?” Mike […]

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Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: May 15, 2026

Mark Graban — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:14:00 +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. Ryan McCormack's latest mixtape circles a common theme: the leadership habits and shortcuts that got organizations here are increasingly the ones holding them back. Expect sharp pieces on why root cause can't be discovered […]

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GM Wrote It Down in 1987. They Still Didn’t Get It. [Lean Coffee Talk]

Mark Graban — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:04:00 +0000

Formerly known as “Lean Whiskey” Listen: In Season 2, Episode 8, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh settle in with single-origin coffees, and circle back to a topic that's been bouncing around the lean world for forty years: NUMMI. But first, the customary check-in. Jamie reports back from a busy stretch close to home, including a Center for Supply Chain Research symposium at Lehigh on AI in supply chain (with Penske, NFI, Crayola, and Sharp Services […]

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The Magic of Small, Odd Experiments: What Rory Sutherland Can Teach Lean Practitioners

Mark Graban — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:29:09 +0000

TL;DR: Rory Sutherland's Alchemy is a useful provocation for Lean practitioners. Lean already knows how to test small, low-cost ideas without demanding an airtight ROI in advance. We sometimes forget. A Small Idea, Quietly Killed A few years ago, I was in a hospital workshop when a nurse mentioned she had an idea for a small change to her unit's supply layout. Her manager, who had been nodding along all morning about Kaizen, asked what […]

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