Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 8, 2013

By sheer happenstance, I had just gotten a copy of Gemba Walks , a collection of essays by James Womack , a co-author of the automotive classic The Machine That Changed The World and a pioneering importer of Toyota-inspired lean production insights and methodologies to America. What does it mean for your company and industry?

Innovation 10

Innovation Lean Production Disintermediation Incubator 10

Harvard Business Review

MAY 26, 2016

Producers in less-developed countries compete by keeping costs low. It involves replacing traditional mass manufacturing with “lean manufacturing” principles. In addition to improved product quality and delivery times, the lean approach has been linked to improved terms of employment.

Lean Manufacturing 13

Lean Manufacturing Supply Chain Apparel Compliance 13

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 23, 2012

Just as the "quality" and "lean production" movements of the 80s and 90s required quality to be designed — rather than inspected — in, innovators have got to demonstrate greater ingenuity and integrity around how they integrate real-world testing into their projects and processes. These pathologies are nothing new.

Leadership 15

Leadership Innovation Lean Production Learning-by-Doing 15

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 25, 2014

Develop deep expertise — your best risk-mitigation strategy . The most important way to mitigate risk is to become excellent at either engineering, product, selling, or operations and management. Lean Product Development and Customer Development processes) decreases the chance of a startup’s failure.

Career 10

Career Company IPO Christensen 10

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 15, 2014

When is it possible to predict a product’s success? How you answer this question may be the most important factor in how you design your product development process — and, ultimately, in whether your business succeeds or fails. Is market performance predictable for a specific product or class of products?

Black-Scholes 8

Black-Scholes Productivity Products CAPM 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 22, 2015

Many companies still compete this way and there continue to be successors to Taylorism, including business process reengineering and lean production. Some companies brought together Six Sigma and lean production into “Lean Six Sigma” as a way of competing with both lower costs and higher quality.

Six Sigma 8

Six Sigma Company Lean Production Taylor 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 17, 2013

They created and maintained a close connection to frontline staff — what Jim Womack , the expert in lean production and thinking, calls “going to gemba ” — Japanese for “the actual place.”. At Mid Staffs, instead of this essential connection, there was a yawning gap.

Crisis 12

Crisis Health Care Quality System 12

Harvard Business Review

JULY 27, 2015

In the 1980s, our organizations learned a great deal about how to improve productivity, quality, and costs from Japanese practices. That would never fly in marketing, operations research, or even accounting, where academics are all over new developments. A few decades ago, U.S. Let me explain.

Lean Production 8

Lean Production Operations Health Care Talent Management 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 12, 2012

Danaher, a smaller but very profitable conglomerate with a diverse range of manufacturing businesses, has a very different set of strengths; it applies its distinctive lean production system to a variety of product sectors, often through companies that it acquires and then transforms.

Welch 9

Welch Diversity Hedge Chemicals 9

Harvard Business Review

MAY 28, 2015

Robotics is a good example: It’s obvious that it can increase productivity, but it takes some know-how to put robots to work. Organizations develop processes through repeated problem solving. Insight Center. The Future of Operations. Sponsored by GE Corporate. The technologies and trends shaping tomorrow’s businesses.

Technology 8

Technology Depreciation Christensen Short-term 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 10, 2015

More and more companies are adopting software and product development frameworks like Agile , Scrum , and Kanban — which promote quick, iterative, lean production — to deliver higher quality products, faster.

Project 8

Project Management Agility White Paper 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 2, 2016

Generally, what we see is the country where the final assembly of a product took place. Almost every sophisticated manufacturer uses some kind of lean production system that pulls raw materials in from a warehouse. If you were to walk through some of those foreign factories, you would get a very different picture.

Supply Chain 8

Supply Chain Globalization Cost Efficiency 8