We hit a milestone recently where our company, mostly the folks in manufacturing, made our 5000th lean improvement video in just 3 short years.

At Cambridge, we speak of having love for our fellow employees often. This isn’t the romantic love, though today is Valentine’s Day, but rather, the sort of love that is built upon mutual respect, admiration, and encouragement to learn and grow personally. Our playbook even includes the phrase “We express unconditional love and high expectations while behaving with care, courage, integrity and respect.” It might not be instinctive to recognize love in the workplace, but when you are aware of it, we’d bet that it is, in fact, surrounding you. We are going to share some examples of how love manifests itself into everyday life in our workplace, so that anyone reading this blog may start to recognize

One might consider labeling the items you use in your everyday workspace part of the low-hanging fruit when starting in your lean journey.  As simple as it seems, it could also be one of the most important. It’s easy to underestimate the time spent looking for a tool, or referencing it against a process checklist to make sure it’s correct. But, imagine you have been assigned a task that should take about 20 minutes to complete. Your workspace has the equipment necessary, but there are also extra tools, scattered around the workstation. The task should be easy, but you haven’t performed this exact task in the past few months. A good portion of this 20 minutes could be spent just trying to figure out what you need, and what might be missing.

Leadership continues to hone its strategic planning process, and how strategic initiatives reflecting lean progress and goals are communicated throughout the organization. Having a three- to nine-month “thematic goal” or rallying cry, with defining objectives, has been a primary method for building alignment during the past five years.

Humility, Cultural Recruiting & Morning Meetings

“For us, lean is about people and people growth,” said Sitton. “It’s not something that is simply implemented. You can’t just drop it on people.” Key elements in creating lean understanding include lean classes for all new hires using “2 Second Lean” as a guide, and then taking them out to the shop floor and asking them to stand there and look for the eight types of waste. “Within ten minutes, they typically see 20 to 50 wastes,”