The Sustainable Development division of IISE conducted an interview with Brad Miller, who is Senior Professor of Practice in the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. He shares his success with teaching students how to apply lean and Six Sigma methods in their homes and at their part-time jobs, including two projects […]
Andrew Parris works for an NGO called Medair, which provides disaster relief and recovery services to people in need all over the world. In this interview, he explains how continuous improvement can be used in a humanitarian context, and how his Process Excellence Accelerator program trained over 400 people in Lean and Six Sigma methods. […]
Written by Brion
Christopher Chapman, Senior Lean Transformation Coach, calls on lean thinkers to leverage our skills to eradicate the waste of racism in our businesses, worker lives, their families, their community and society. Lean thinkers: We have plenty of experience using humble inquiry and other problem-solving tools to root-out non-valued-activities in our organizations. Now we need to […]
Written by Brion
by Brion Hurley While reading the book, Above the Law by Matthew Whitaker, I learned about the Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) program that has been deployed in many neighborhoods in the United States to reduce gun violence. “[PSN] is a nationwide initiative that brings together federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and […]
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by Brion Hurley In June 2020, former University of Iowa football players raised concerns about the mistreatment of Black players in the program. As a former player at Iowa, this news impacted me personally, and I’ve been following this story since it first came out. Just to be clear, I am white, and was born […]
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Lauren Wisniewski is a lean consultant who works primarily with nonprofits. Growing up with a father that worked at General Motors (GM), she learned about process improvement at an early age. She shared her experiences helping non-profits incorporate lean methods, along with the benefits and barriers they encounter. She talks about one project that reduced […]
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The Oregon City Farmers Market reached out to Lean Portland for suggestions on how to offer their year-round market during a pandemic. As Lean Portland has experienced with other nonprofits, their goal is to remove waste and inefficiency in the process unrelated to building relationships, so that more time can be spent in conversation between volunteers, staff and […]
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Racism, inclusion and discrimination is not a problem many lean thinkers are called to tackle in their daily lives at work, but that doesn’t mean that Lean Thinking has nothing to say about it. Roberto Priolo interviews Michael Balle, co-founder of the Institut Lean France, and is asked numerous questions, including: If we look at […]
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Tim Turner worked at Toyota in Kentucky (TMMK) for 22 years, and has done a lot of work with nonprofits and not-for-profit organizations. He created the book, One Team on All Levels: Stories from Toyota Team Members In this podcast interview, he discusses his vast experiences and positions at Toyota, his perspective on servant leadership, […]
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by Brion Hurley The Lean Government Exchange is an annual one day event of government officials, stakeholders and advocates implementing lean principles (primarily members of the Iowa Lean Consortium, but open to all). I last attended the inaugural Exchange in June 2017 in Des Moines, Iowa. Due to the pandemic, I was actually able to […]
Written by Brion