Shingo Manufacturing Summit
Visual Thinking Briefing
Knoxville, TN
September 20
Register
Visual Displays
Glenwood, MN
Oct 3-5
Registration Closed
Visual Thinking Seminars and Site Assessments
Querétaro, Mexico
October 17-22
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In implementing visual order, we ask the most valuable group in the enterprise--value-add associates--to help improve their own work area and their own work flow by getting the workplace to speak the answer to the where question again and again. The dialogue is between the employee and his/her own work. Having line employees install the visual where is a vital component in the company getting the workforce to connect to the physicality of the change.
- Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth,
from Visual Workplace/Visual Thinking
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Great signs, clever visual devices, artistic or humorous graffiti. If you find one to share, send the image to
[email protected]
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Listen to Gwendolyn this
Thursday at 10am
(Pacific) on
How involved should value-add associates be in making a visual workplace conversion a success? If you ask Gwendolyn Galsworth, a lot! One of the major mechanisms for doing this is "The Visual Workplace Steering Team"--the topic of today's show. Call this team what you will, it consists of hourly employees who volunteer to monitor the visual roll out in the enterprise and provide feedback and recommendations to help ensure its success. Its members collaborate with management to make sure the company keeps true to the cultural values and implementation principles it professes to embrace. While this team, by design, has no positional authority, it does have significant responsibility. In short: empowerment on steroids! Tune in for the details on: what this team is, how it functions (autonomously), what it contributes--and how it governs itself and learns to govern itself.
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The Two Sides of Lean: False Rivals
(Part 2 of 3) (Encore Series)
by Gwendolyn Galsworth, PhD
The world of lean is grappling with sharp illogic that is creating rumblings among the ranks. And uneasiness in the board room. The chickens of the inconsistency and muddled thinking of the past three decades have come home to roost. On the one hand, some of us see lean as a known and knowable destination, closely defined and achievable through a tight formulaic sequence of application. Others of us hold that lean has become synonymous with continuous improvement--or as Jones and Womack stated it, "the pursuit of perfection." This is lean as a never-ending process, coterminous with continuous improvement, and without a hard edge.
This muddle-ness troubles me because I am a practitioner with allegiance to two worlds--but maybe not the two you think. One is the world of what works: What helps companies actually move forward, stay in business, succeed, forge ahead--a world of practical inputs and knowable outputs. The other is the world of words and meaning: What things mean; how terms are defined; how meaning adjusts and lends us strength; how meaning can erode and throw us off track; and how definitions can get us back again.
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| And the Visual Fail Prize Goes To... |
Have you seen a Visual Fail that made you laugh? Send the image to
[email protected],
and we'll put it here and credit you with the funny find!
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