The 2014 Mid-Year Leany Awards

First, there was The Shingo Prize.  Next came The Silver Toaster Award.  Now, The KaiZone is proud to bring to you the first ever Leany Awards, for excellence in Lean blogging!  In this very special edition of The KaiZone Friday Favorites, we’re going to take a look back and recognize the top author, blog and post of the half-year for 2014.

How the Winners Were Chosen

Each and every morning, I have made a habit of starting my day by reading the new posts from more than 60 blogs in the world of Lean and continuous improvement.  Every two weeks, I select the ten most original, thoughtful and entertaining posts to create TheKaiZone Friday Favorites.

To determine the best of the best, I’ve assigned a point total to each of the 120 posts to appear on the Friday Favorites this half-year.  For each edition, 10 points were given to first place, 9 points for second, 8 points for third, etc . . . I then totaled up all the points from each of the 12 KaiZone Friday Favorites this year to determine the Leany Award winners for the top Lean Blog Author and top Lean Blog of the half-year 2014.

On the other hand, the Leany Award for the best single post was selected completely subjectively by yours truly, based on the piece that I found most impactful over the past six months.  Sorry . . . my blog, my rules!

And now that the formalities are out of the way, it’s time to award the first ever Leany Award to the top Lean blogger of 2014.

Lean Blogger of the Half-Year 2014

Although prolific post producers Mark Graban and Bob Emiliani each had more total posts appear in TheKaiZone Friday Favorites, no one combined quantity with quality quite like The Old Lean Dude, Bruce Hamilton! It’s only fitting that the man who first exposed me to Lean with the classic Toast Kaizen would also take home the first ever Leany Award.  See the table below for the entirety of the top 10 Lean bloggers of 2014.

Rank	Author	Friday Favorites Appearances	Total Points
1	Bruce Hamilton	6	50
2	Mark Graban	9	40
3	Bob Emiliani	8	37
4	Karen Martin	4	36
5	Pascal Dennis	6	31
6	Bill Waddell	3	26
7	Jon Miller	3	22
8	Michel Baudin	4	22
9	Tim McMahon	4	22
10	Matt Elson	5	21

Lean Blog of the Half-Year 2014

With an army of leading Lean authors covering an astounding variety of topics, it should come as no surprise that the Lean Post at the Lean Enterprise Institute garnered the Leany for the best Lean blog of 2014 . . . by a landslide.  With more than double the points of its closest competition, the perennial powerhouse The Old Lean Dude and the world-class collaborations at The Lean Edge, the Lean Post proved itself as the go-to blog for quality Lean content.  See the rest of the top 10 Lean blogs of 2014 below.

Rank	Blog Name	Friday Favorites Appearances	Total Points
1	The Lean Post	20	123
2	Old Lean Dude	6	50
3	The Lean Edge	6	43
4	Mark Graban’s Lean Blog	9	40
5	Lean Pathways	8	38
6	BobEmiliani.com	8	37
7	Lean Leadership Ways	5	36
8	The Karen Martin Group	4	36
9	Manufacturing Leadership	3	26
10	The Journey to True North	6	23

 Lean Blog Post of the Half-Year 2014

10.  Strategy Deployment & Dieting by Pascal Dennis.   “When it comes to strategy deployment, ‘more companies die from over-eating than from starvation’.”

9.  Value Stream Mapping: Ferrari or Pinto by Karen Martin.  “The first question I ask when being brought in to lead value stream improvement is:  What problem are you trying to solve?  This question is closely followed by: How do you know you have a problem? Without metrics, both questions are nearly impossible to answer. And if you can’t answer those questions, you should probably move on to another problem. After all, in most organizations, there’s no shortage of problems to be solved!”  

8.  Kaizen is Not an Event, It’s About Everday-Everybody-Engaged by Tracey Richardson.  “When kaizen is given a label as the “event” it tends to become something we only do when we deem we have time for it. If you have to make time for it then that should be an immediate “andon pull” to how we lead / manage our organization and develop people. This can slowly get us off course and as a result bad habits can be developed by leadership . What you want to see is “Everyday-Everybody-Engaged” (E”cubed”).”

7.  What is Enterprise Lean and How Do We Get There? by Jeffrey Liker.  “Since Plan-Do-Check-Act is the process needed to carry out sustainable improvement at all levels, it requires skilled practitioners at all levels—from the C-suite to the working level.”

6.  Why is “What is Lean?” ‘A Simple Question Without An Easy Answer’? by Jon Miller.  “Whatever the causes, there is something that is cognitively jarring about a lean community who seem completely happy to fail to agree on a simple, clear, standard definition and an answer to the question, “What is lean?” Lean requires improvement. Improvement demands standards. Standards demand clarity. Clarity demands removal of ambiguity. Accepting ambiguity in the definition of lean is not lean and the lean community should not accept it.”

5.  Ask Art: How Much Lean Training Should We Be Doing? by Art Byrne. “I learned how to run a kaizen directly from the Shingijustu Company (men who spent years working directly for Taiichi Ohno at Toyota). They had a rather dramatic approach. “What do you want to work on?” they would ask me, and when I replied, their response was, “Ok, let’s go, start moving equipment and start a cell.” This was shocking, and it worked. As we went along with this, they taught us the organization, structure, tools, and materials needed to run a kaizen. But it all started simply, on the shop floor. See the waste, eliminate the waste, right now.”

4.  Which Side Are You On? by Michael Ballé.  “Modern corporations are built upon the idea that efficiency must be enforced through staff systems. Finance enforces cost accountability because operational people will spend like there is no tomorrow.  IT enforces complexity management because things have gone so far out of hand no human could possibly deal with such complex systems. Human Resources are fast become a labor cost control function. Each functional director must convince the CEO that applying their preferred program, initiative, or system will force line managers in getting the results every one asks from them.”

3.  Knowledge Work by Bruce Hamilton.  “In my world, all work is knowledge work.”

2.  The Simple Power of Lean Culture by Bill Waddell.  “If you can get all of your people thinking that they can come together; and respecting the fact that none of them know everything, but that everyone of them knows something; and that they all have a common purpose; and that they all have people riding on them; and that thousands of lives are going to be better because they figured it out . . . then it’s amazing what people can accomplish.”

And the Leany Award for the best Lean blog post of 2014 goes to . . . drum roll please . . .

1.  Is Lean a Waste Elimination Program or Striving for Excellence? by Jeffrey Liker.  “The real challenge is to replace the old habits of people that focus on today’s problems, quick resolution, with little learning with a set of skilled routines to systematically improve toward clear targets.

What to Look for in the Half Year Ahead

The KaiZone Friday Favorites will be back . . . bigger, better and bloggier than ever before!  I’ve scoured the depths of the interwebs and added tons of new blogs to my morning blogroll to bring you only the absolute best Lean content available.  Can anyone make toast out of Bruce Hamilton?  Is there another blog that can topple The Lean Post?  Follow along with TheKaiZone in the second half of 2014 and find out!

Super Special Extra Bonus Content!

Friend of TheKaiZone and fellow KaiZone Coaches author Michael Grogan was recently featured on the Gemba Academy Podcast.  For those that are not familiar with Michael’s work, I emplore you to listen to Michael’s interview with Ron Pereira using the link below.

For the last two years, Michael has been following his true calling in life, working to apply Lean thinking to the Tanzanian health care system in order to drive down the high number of preventable infant and maternal deaths in the country.  Michael is the epitome of what is possible when passion meets purpose, and exemplifies like no one else the true power of Lean thinking.

Have a good weekend, friends!