Process improvers the world over rally around root cause analysis as if it were the Holy Grail of all things organizational. But is it? Understanding the root cause of a problem certainly makes sense in the context of a present day situation carrying the potential for a correct answer or solution. In the process improvement world, problems center on reducing ...

As innovators, we all want to do three key things: Create something new, fantastic and disruptive; Bring it to the market fast enough to capture its value and grow our business; Do it again (and again, and again...)

Lean Startup or Stage-Gate? More often organizations are not choosing one or the other but taking the “and” option and integrating both into their product processes. The challenge is how to get them to play nice with each other and gain the benefits of each without losing something in the process.

For the past year, I’ve been working with a Baptist minister, Rev. Jeffrey Brown, to help fund and scale his proven approach to violence reduction. Rev. Brown has spent the past 25+ years helping Boston and 21 other communities reduce violence. His TED talk tells the story about the The Boston Miracle — a 29 consecutive month period of zero juvenile homicides. As ...

Can you truly predict a customers’ reaction to a new innovative product and then scale the success of the product? Lean practitioners say you can, if you measure the right metrics, interpret them correctly, and focus on the problem and the uncertainties that arise.

My MBA start-up competition @hultbiz just finished. My best teams were awesome. Every team demonstrated plenty of inspiration and perspiration, but the best teams were willing to do a few very uncomfortable things that the average teams weren’t.

Do you think they have “innovation days” at Google, GoPro, and Netflix? At these companies, every day is innovation day! At Google, everyone gets 20% time to do whatever he/she wants. Most of Google’s new products and features come from this kind of tinkering and in-house organic hustle. They don’t come from planning or innovation days.

Innovation is serious business. The lifeblood of your company depends on your ability to serve the changing world with new products and services while continuing to generate profits. What does this have to do with comedy? Turns out there are a lot of similarities.

I've started working with a local healthcare insurance company in a role focused on driving improvement and innovation in its membership and billing operations. The company has a big focus on LEAN throughout the company and always has some sort of value stream mapping (VSM) or rapid process improvement workshop (RPIW) going on through the Kaizen Promotion Office (KPO). Despite this only being my second week on the job, I have already been involved in the company's LEAN efforts.

I get the question all the time, especially from organizations who have significant investment in some process improvement program — like a "lean six sigma" or "lean kaizen" initiative - and have picked all the low-hanging fruit clean, squeezed as much inefficiency from their work as is humanly feasible, and are now realizing that their beloved program wasn't all that market-focused.