Lean Blog by Mark Graban

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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Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: Best of First Half of 2026

Ryan McCormack — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:22:28 +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. A midyear roundup of the ten most-clicked Operational Excellence Mixtape links from the first half of 2026, covering leadership, productivity, decision-making, change management, respect for people, and AI. The list shows that readers remain […]

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Do Not Remove: What a Kaizen Binder Taught Me in Japan

Mark Graban — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:59:00 +0000

On a factory table in Japan, in December 2019, there was a binder. White cover, the word KAIZEN in big orange letters, a photo of cherry blossoms underneath. Inside the front cover, someone had printed a word cloud — IMPROVEMENT, DEMING, PDCA, TOYOTA — and a hand-drawn PDCA with a finger pointing at it. Someone had put real care into the cover. This was not a binder shoved in a cabinet to satisfy an auditor […]

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What Toyota’s 1992 Booklet Leaves Out About Leadership

Mark Graban — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:28:00 +0000

The 1992 Toyota booklet says surprisingly little about leadership. There's a Kiichiro Toyoda quote about engineers getting their hands dirty. There's a brief sentence about executives visiting the workplace and acting on what they see. That's about it. For a forty-page document about a production system the world spent the next thirty years trying to copy, that's a remarkably thin treatment of the people running the place. Continuing the thread from earlier posts on Toyota's […]

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