30 learnings from my LEAN journey

What if I told you I know the receipt how to quickly orientate yourself when in production. What if I even give you that receipt. Will you take it? If yes, keep on reading 😊 Imagine you enter a production shop floor for the first time. What is the first thing you notice? How do you orient yourself in what you see? Those were my questions for a very long time. When I saw a production site for the first time, I was overwhelmed by machinery, materials, people. Sometimes it looked chaotical. Sometimes very clean and in order. So the first thing I started to notice was whether production was clean. Yeah, after a time, my focus was on 5S. In other words, whether the shop floor is clean and organized. However, I felt it was not enough. I knew I needed to be looking for something more sophisticated. Something more related to LEAN than just 5S. As you already know, I started to understand the production system after reading books by Shigeo Shingo. In my previous blog , I state that to understa

"To spend three years looking for a good master is better than to train for three years with a bad one." I got that advice when studying Aiki-Jitsu during my University time. Nowadays, I see the application of this advice in every field a person wants to get better. Why? For one simple reason - there is a lot of junk knowledge everywhere. So how do we know which master is a good one? We don't. At least not at first sight. When I encounter new knowledge, a book, or insights from the training, I always ask myself: am I able to apply that particular knowledge to the practice immediately? If yes, I try it, and then I decide whether the new learning is good. If I cannot apply the knowledge immediately, then it remains knowledge. You know the saying: Gemba is the best teacher. Applying a theory in practice is the best filter to differentiate whether the information sources are reliable. I read, on average, 18 books a year , plus some blogs and articles. And I very often do obse

The most important learning on my LEAN journey is not about the LEAN at all.  When I started to discover the real business world - just after University- I attended one Leadership training. It was that kind of „ tasting” training, which consulting companies do to attract people. I guess companies do it hoping people will buy a complete training. So, I did not expect much from it - and as you might guess - I also did not want to buy the training afterward. However, there is one learning that stuck with me for all those years. The learning worth more than the learnings I gather from many complete trainings I paid for. The trainer at one point said that the most essential tool of a successful leader is a dictionary . Not a translation dictionary, but a dictionary in one’s language. Weird, right? It seemed to me be weird at that time. Oddly, I kept reminding myself year after year without understanding why it was so crucial. Recently, I found out why. The paradox is that I realized that a