Conflict? We don’t need no stinking conflict!

Conflict Management Put two people in a room and at some point, there will be conflict. The story is as old as Cain and Abel. Cain and Abel were the first and second sons of Adam and Eve. While Cain was a farmer, Abel was a skilled shepherd who took care of the family’s animals. […]

Need to improve? You need PDCA

The name of the blog is theleansubmariner. While much of my writing is based on submarines and their history, every once in a while, I fall back on my other passion which is the “lean” part of the title. Lean is a process that leads to the elimination of waste (among other outcomes), but it […]

Shikumi: System Based Lean Transformation

Thinking about systems? Every once in a while, I see lean ideas that seem to come at just the right time. I have been preaching about the importance of a systems approach to successful lean implementations for years and found an article that gives an interesting take on that vision. From the article: ” Shikumi signifies a […]

May 31 2017 – Another Milestone

Another Milestone May 31 2017 marks the end of my second career. When I retired from the US Navy in August of 1994, I foolishly assumed that the travel and adventure was all in the rear view mirror. We were headed to a little town in Kansas where I would be happy helping save […]

Continuous Learning – It’s a Navy Thing

When I am not writing about submarines, I am normally busy with my day job which is helping the companies I work with to better understand continuous improvement or “lean thinking”. While one is solely vocational in nature and the other is purely avocational both share the same basic roots: Continuous Learning. As a young boy, I was […]

Training 101 – What we can learn about training from the Little Rascals

A little lengthy but probably worth the read in the long run if you have been tasked with developing a “training event” by a well meaning person with absolutely no training development experience. Just a primer for how to develop training (from an old training professional). Training can be deceptively simple. I am often reminded […]

Surfacing Employee Engagement

Years ago I belonged to a very bureaucratic organization that had multiple “business units” performing many of the same tasks on a global level. I was a member of five of these units and made some observations about how each performed. All had the exact same mission and vision statements. All had the exact same […]

Searching for the Holy Grail: LEASIGCICCISM

LEASIGCICCISM leansigmacontinuousimprovingculturechangeism Spanning the Globe For over seventeen years, I have been involved with lean initiatives that seem to cover the globe. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been a good ride. I wasn’t sure what I would be doing when I left the Navy but the roles I have played in helping the universal search […]

5S Boot Camp

In the many lean implementations I have been involved with, establishing a discipline of 5S has always been one of the foundations sought after. The term “5S” of course comes from the Toyota system of lean but for anyone who ever went through boot camp or basic training, it has a number of other descriptions. […]

The Lean Facilitator

The practice of lean involves eliminating waste wherever it is found and solving problems (which typically leads to waste elimination). In all things, we are trying to remove the barriers that keep our teams from being successful. But team building can be a tricky thing in any culture. Most western cultures are deeply rooted in […]