Leankor

Why Improvement Plans Often Fail

As Lean managers, part of your responsibility to your organization is to observe the value each step in the production process and look for ways it can be improved. Many Lean leaders create lofty continuous improvement plans attached to equally towering sets of goals. Unfortunately, studies over the past couple of decades show that upwards […]

How Buffering Can Help Those Workflow Bottlenecks

Lean leaders spend a fair chunk of time trying to make their company’s processes more efficient. This harkens back to the tenet of lean management of continuous improvement, i.e. constantly evaluating each step in the process to ensure it adds to the value chain. Finding bottlenecks in a particular workflow and appropriately managing them can […]

How Slack Can Improve Your Business

Companies and managers who subscribe to the lean philosophy spend a significant portion of their time and effort trying to boost productivity of their teams. Whether it’s through limiting work in progress, incentivizing performance or other methods, lean leaders are continuously attempting to keep employees constantly productive. But forcing everyone’s nose to the grindstone every […]

How to Redesign Processes to Cut End-to-End Time

By this point, most of our blog readers are familiar with the primary tenets of lean management. And one of the core lean principles is continuous improvement, which dictates that a lean organization should be driven to constantly innovate in an effort to improve its processes end to end. That primary lean principle feeds into […]

Five Things Managers Should Stop Doing Right Now

Many things weigh on business leaders. From choosing the right direction on projects to hiring employees, managers have to make many crucial decisions during day-to-day operations. But just because managers are running a team doesn’t mean they should wield their power any way they want. Those leaders who subscribe to the tenets of lean management […]

Using Lean Flow to Coordinate Conflicting Priorities

As we know, one of the basic principles of lean management is to optimize the production flow from beginning to end. Essentially, creating a product or initiating a service and delivering it to your customers should take as little time and use as few resources as possible without compromising on quality. This is all done […]

How to Cultivate Creativity in Your Team

Thinking outside the box can help team members solve problems, collaborate more effectively and nurture fresh new ideas. In general, creativity can boost overall business performance. But creativity is generally something that happens organically — it can’t be forced. So how can business leaders cultivate this quality in their employees? We’ve all heard the research […]

How To Use the Lean Decision Filter to Make the Right Choice

As a business leader, making decisions about how to move various projects forward can prove to be a daunting task in itself. Making the right choice can be a tough formula to crack. So how can you know how to proceed and which task to tackle first? Having too many choices and the wealth of […]

Why Accountability Doesn’t Mean Pointing Fingers

Many organizations struggle to create a corporate culture of accountability and personal responsibility. And in theory, this can be a fantastic way to nurture an environment where employees don’t need external motivators to get the job done in a timely manner — they hold themselves accountable and are intrinsically motivated to get things accomplished. Managers […]