It’s that special time of year: open enrollment season. Over the next few weeks, employees will be choosing between plans through their employers. And many other self-employed people will purchase insurance through health care exchanges. A year ago, my wife was pregnant with our second child, so I knew we would face hefty medical bills.…
The role of a parent is a difficult one. First, there’s the burden of the mother to carry a child. Then, that child must be birthed. The next two years of its life that child is completely helpless (note: on occasion this timeframe can extend much further, sometimes into adulthood). Then, you must instruct, teach,…
I recently read a brilliant book called The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks.
The primary idea in the book is that you have an Upper Limit Problem that controls the degree of overall wellbeing in your life.
In our last post in our series on lean, we introduced the seven wastes. Why does waste matter? Waste matters for a number of reasons, though the top three for me are listed below: It’s damaging to the environment It’s expensive It’s slow It wastes human lives and potential I’m going to cover the first…
We’ve previously discussed the importance of focusing on value creation. I like to think of value creation as the importance of rendering service to another human where profit is the thing that lets you do it again. From there, we discussed the entire value stream and the importance of ensuring that your value stream flows…
Today’s post on lean has to do with a topic that’s often misunderstood: perfection. The lean enterprise should pursue perfection. It should continuously improve and work to make each processes leaner along the way. Perfection is a tricky goal, however, as it is a continuously variable goal and one that, by definition, you will never…
The lean concept of pull is an extension of flow. Within flow, we’re trying to eliminate excess inventories and places where the product stops moving. The idea is to get an entire value stream continuously flowing. So, what drives the flow of the value stream? The customer. Customer demand is what makes the value stream…
Flow means to move steadily and continuously in a current or stream. From a lean manufacturing standpoint, we’ve previously discussed that value is defined by the customer and the importance of mapping the entire value stream for your product or service. Your value stream is what you’re trying to make flow. This may seem quite…
Daniel Diffenderfer 