Total Confirmed to date
NEW cases only to date
ACTIVE cases only to date
Converting from a lean dreamer to a lean realist
"Converting from a lean dreamer to a lean realist"
- several great business insights in this
https://www.lean.org/womack/DisplayObject.cfm?o=711
Performance Enhancements in Sports - Ethics in Major League Baseball on Steroids
Business Ethics Assignment from Nov. 27, 2005 - decision to examine MLB (Major League Baseball) stance on steroids after deemed an illegal performance enhancer in North America, contrasted with laser eye surgery.
Authors: Ryan Cartier & Xin Jin.
I decided to scan & upload online. If there’s enough interest I’ll figure out how to upload the pdf and might have it typed up, let me know
Disclaimer:
I've been involved in sports and around athletes most of my life. It is a personal decision to use performance enhancements.
I am indifferent to someone else’s decision to use performance enhancements; I have known many who do and do not.
In the case an athlete decides to compete in a league where they have agreement or rules existing that performance enhancements are not to be used which they decide to accept, both the individual and the league should honour the criteria they have committed to.
Comparing Lean in Manufacturing and Insurance - Mark Deluzio
I have a lot of notes from this, may post if requested; watch it twice
11th Ebola Outbreak Declared Over Nov 18, 2020
WHO (World Health Organization) declared current ebola outbreak over in Wangata Mbandaka region DRC. It started in May, a few months after the corona virus, and during the period in which the 10th outbreak in the eastern DRC was announced over. Stats:
130 cases (119 confirmed and 11 probable)
55 deaths (42.3% case-fatality rate)
75 recoveries.
According to the WHO, an Ebola outbreak is over when 42 days (twice the virus' incubation period) have passed since the last survivor tests positive.
Health officials will continue to watch for cases, as survivors can relapse and/or sexually transmit the virus for up to 6 months.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/11/who-declares-end-drcs-11th-ebola-outbreak
As I could not find any visual tracking, I continued maintaining this chart since my previous post:
80% reduction in development time to support covid vaccine.
Lean and the global Covid-19 vaccine race
Pall Corp. used lean product and process development (LPPD) principles to reduce normal 40 week development times down to 8 weeks.
Calgary zone Covid19 cases to end October 2020
update based on the daily numbers Alberta Health published:
Calgary Zone Covid19 TOTAL Confirmed cases:
Calgary zone covid19 NEW cases only to date
Calgary zone covid19 ACTIVE cases only to date
October increase has surpassed all previous numbers.
10 Important Shifts in Thinking People Don't Talk About with Lean
Another great write up by Karl Ohaus, link here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-important-shifts-thinking-people-dont-talk-lean-karl-ohaus
key points:
‘teams try to “implement Lean” without making critical shifts in leadership thinking’
‘it requires leadership to shift their thinking to be able to benefit organizations at all.’
‘Every defect is an opportunity to learn.’
‘If you are too busy to acknowledge that something is a problem, then your organization will be right there with you’
A lean view on… the fight against Climate Change
Article link: https://planet-lean.com/a-lean-views-on-the-fight-against-climate-change
my notes/key points:
“The difficulty is compounded by the fact that most senior management are not looking for real, radical change. Most of the time, sadly but unsurprisingly, they’re seeking confirmation:
"tell me that what I’m doing is already lean.”
Leaders discover the way, others play catch-up, the world moves forward.
What lean really has to offer is not off-the-shelf pre-packaged solutions. Loving the package more than what is inside is the drama of the current zeitgeist.”
Launching Lean at Danaher
read the article twice:
my notes/key points from it:
“While they were pretty slow, way too expensive, and loved power point presentations, we did create our first couple of cells.”
“We even put potted plants in the first cell just to show how different the new look was.”
“We just did this because it made common sense.”
“These individuals were the real deal.”
“50 percent. Everything can be cut by 50 percent.” Later they told us they said 50 percent because they didn’t think we would want to hear the real number. We liked that as we were only thinking about 30 percent
“listen and learn. Don’t push back. We found right away that lean (Just-inTime back then) was “learn-by-doing” and we wanted to learn.”
“Mark helped us initially in finance by moving us away from standard cost accounting and toward something similar to what is now called lean accounting, and later became instrumental in creating/running the Danaher Business System (DBS). Switching to lean accounting was another big lesson as it allowed us to finally see what was going on and didn’t fight lean as standard cost accounting does. It also created great productivity in finance as Mark was able to go from 25 to 9 people and close the books in a day and a half.”
“all leaders need to emerge themselves in the details of lean and become lean experts themselves if they want to have a successful lean turnaround.”
“learning was the greatest strategic weapon we had ever seen.”
“cut your lead times from weeks to days, increase your productivity, drastically improve your quality and free up over half your floor space by removing the waste from your operations then you would have a huge strategic advantage.”
“A lot of times things didn’t work well at first (in fact most of the time) but we never let it go back to what it was. We just kept pushing till we solved the problems and made it work.”
“we involved the union in everything we did. We were always honest and up front with them. We treated them as equal partners.
we kept proving that every move we made was better for our work force we eventually formed a great relationship. We knew that the best ideas for removing the waste would come from the people doing the work, and that always proved to be true.”
“the Presidents of all 13 Danaher companies to be the lean drivers in their own companies. To do this we had to teach them lean… create the Presidents Kaizen.”
“all the Presidents to participate in a three-day kaizen every six weeks. They weren’t too happy about this at first but the gains we got every time were so big that this quickly changed.”
“Mark DeLuzio created the M&A integration process as well as the due diligence process as it related to DBS. And along with Larry Culp, Danaher CEO (and now the CEO of GE), developed the strategic planning process for all of Danaher”
David Belson's Letter to WSJ
David Belson’s letter to the Wall Street Journal in response to last week’s front page article about hospitals cutting costs and laying off staff. WSJ erroneously stated that efficiency caused a lack of being prepared for an emergency such as Covid-19. Noting how misleading this is, David wrote the WSJ.
They published his letter on Monday, shown here:
Applying Operational Excellence to Mining
"Balancing the workload among different production lines led to a 19.3% increase in productivity
(we did invest some money in modernizing our equipment and improving processes)."
The management team of a Lithuanian mining company explains how they are transforming themselves to overcome resistance to business change.
- machine efficiency rate went up 20%.
Main mobile equipment used to shut down for planned maintenance every 150 hours, whereas today it does only every 250.
article here: https://planet-lean.com/fighting-resistance-lean-mining
Calgary zone covid19 cases only to date Sept. 2020
No further replies from Alberta Health to my questions including why they stopped publishing weekend numbers, etc. Still waiting…
Here’s the update based on the numbers they published:
Calgary Zone Covid19 TOTAL Confirmed cases:
NEW cases only to date
ACTIVE cases only to date
11th Ebola Outbreak 2020 - New & Total Cases
I started paying attention to the 11th Ebola outbreak in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) digging for stats from headlines I could find. I have been using the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy data at https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/Node/64 since August which publishes every time a new case occurs (if errors identified please provide sources for correction).
I do not see a simple visual trend anywhere so again I created my own below.
Cases seem to have tapered off and hopefully will come to an end soon.
CEMEX’s Strategic Mix Business Turnaround:
Example how a commodity seller can become a solution provider growing market share.
CEMEX is one of the rare firms executing lean business strategy beyond the merger & acquisition stage.
Article here: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/00325
These are my unedited notes, however I HIGHLY recommended reading the article. Twice.
Also leveraged mergers & acquisitions including entering new businesses in ready-mix concrete and aggregates
Strategy
long track record in lean operations (“ruthless operating efficiency”) evolved to become one of the most successful companies from an emerging market, and developed a high level of customer responsiveness. It delivers cement within 20 minutes of receiving an order in many locales. Its international business strategy enabled CEMEX to grow rapidly during the 1990s and early 2000s, when it became one of the biggest cement companies in the world.
while maintaining consistently high profitability levels. (In 2014, the company reported US$2.7 billion EBITDA on revenues of $15.7 billion.)
developed a capability for environmental sustainability:
decreasing the company’s own fuel use
removing or mitigating pollutants in materials
and looking for ways its products and services could lead to sustainable practices for all the industries CEMEX serves.
get good at postmerger integration, and extract more value out of those assets than the former owners.
“Enforcing is really the right word. A good example is the emphasis we put on closing the books on the 1st or 2nd day of every month. A lot of managers initially wondered why it was so important to do this. They thought nothing would be lost if they did their closings on the seventh or eighth day. But we believed that having that information readily available would increase the likelihood that managers would make the right decisions. And the practice had a very high-level overseer: Mr. Zambrano himself, into whose email inbox all of these reports flowed. This was not subject to negotiation.”
accounting management
[any] product has a disadvantage in that a customer can find a substitute for it. A solution, by contrast, cannot be that easily replaced. So we started to develop offerings that more closely resembled solutions.
“For CEMEX to play that kind of role, the company needed new capabilities. We needed a new kind of executive, connected with the environment, who understood the real needs of any given locality. We changed old habits; for instance, in the past our people were not prepared to interact with our communities or with the media. We had become an efficient company with an inward-looking culture. But our operational guys realized that they needed to be able to talk to the media, and to local communities and their leaders. The operational guys had to recognize that it wasn’t enough to lower costs; they also had to connect with local people and address their concerns — for example, about the dust generated by trucks picking up materials.”
“The sales guys had to learn not to wait for people to come in with orders; if markets were soft, they had to go out and propose solutions to problems that had not yet been brought to public attention. “We don’t just mend holes in your street — we can prevent those holes from recurring for the next 30 years.” selling concrete
Partly it’s a matter of how we talk about these things with customers. We’re not just selling cement or ready-mix; we’re helping you build a street. We’re helping you build a home. We aren’t selling a product to you; we’re working with you on a solution.”
each business must recapture transport dollars. We won’t dictate how you do it, but we require that you recapture all your freight somehow.
Left to their own devices, big companies will continue to act big. They’ll put in more rules, procedures, and standardization. When you’re running a hyperlocal business like ready-mix concrete and aggregates, you can’t allow that to happen. You have to fight all the time to be small
about 40% of the direct cost of cement is wrapped up in [energy use], you need to watch the expense of fuel and electricity carefully.
Calgary zone covid19 cases only to date August 30, 2020
As reported daily by Alberta Health. They finally responded to one of my questions on twitter about why there is so much of a difference between their daily published numbers and their trend chart. AHS replied “covid19AB cases may fluctuate between daily increases and net increases due to amendments and updates during investigations; this can include transferring out of province cases and resolving the status of probable cases.”
I asked if this means the daily reported #’s are what was identified in Alberta that day, and if Alberta Health is updating for residents testing positive out of province, and subtracting people visiting AB that test positive here, and have heard nothing for 10 days.
Still waiting on responses to my other questions from months ago as well, not expecting a response to them either.
Trend charts based on AHS daily #’s:
Calgary zone TOTAL Confirmed cases to date
Calgary zone covid19 NEW cases to date
Calgary zone ACTIVE cases to date
Senior Management's Willingness Determines Success or Failure
Michael Balle is an excellent resource to learn from:
“Lean systems are really about establishing the conditions for learning - this is the key to a deeper understanding of lean.”
“From a leadership point of view this requires balancing the focus between today (solve problems now or you won’t have a tomorrow) and tomorrow (worry about the next product or you won’t have a tomorrow either). This never is simple and, again, can be learned only through experience.”
“In the end, the success or failure of any serious effort hinges on THE WILLINGNESS OF” senior executives “TO ADOPT revolutionary…”
great comment also: “people confuse a system to produce value more efficiently with a system to add value: continuously develop people to find better ways”
management values to live by
Business management values to live by:
- Customer satisfaction over company internal interests
- Problems are learning opportunities, not occasions for blame
- Shorter lead-times are better than longer ones
- Teamwork over individual heroes
- Fixing problems as they occur over working first and fixing later
Full article: Michael Ballé identifies a set of lean management values to live by
https://planet-lean.com/michael-balle-identifies-a-set-of-lean-management-values-to-live-by
Lean Thinking in Sports - NFL
I’ve shared several examples of lean thinking in sports previously to help management & employees see how it applies everywhere. (not sure if I’ve put any in the blog though, feel free to request)
Here’s a short example from someone else:
Lean Frontiers and Karl Swanke, former Green Bay Packers offensive lineman in the National Football League
“Nobody performs well enough on their own to overcome lack of teamwork."
https://leanfrontiers.com/kata-and-sport-a-winning-combination
Calgary zone covid19 case update to July 31, 2020
Confirmed cases still increasing however recent spike 2 weeks ago seems to have tapered.
Active cases increased for 2 weeks then decreased last week. Mandatory masks start Aug. 1st we’ll see if it has any impact.
Still no proper response from Alberta Health on any questions I’ve asked, they just give me the same link over & over which lacks the information I requested; I also pointed out June 25 the trend chart does not match daily active & confirmed case numbers they published. Here’s the 1st example I sent them:
AHS published 5785 confirmed cases on July 17, the date of this screenshot.
Yet the July 22 trend chart reports
July 17 having 5883 cases.
What accounts for 98 case the difference?
They did not respond to this example. Here’s another: July 30 reports 6470 confirmed cases
However the trend chart on August 2 shows a different number of cases on July 30, it says 6499.
What accounts for the 39 case difference?
I noticed the numbers are often different so I’ve done a few screen shot examples to have them account for the difference.