Lean Six Sigma Academy

Have you ever been forced to listen to a monotone, boring, and oh so irritating instructor teach a class? I’m guessing most of you are nodding your head up and down.

Well I have and can tell you one thing… it hurts. A lot!

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Over the years I have learned some tricks and tips that have helped me immensely. And while I don’t claim to be the world’s best instructor… I can hold the attention of a room no matter the topic – even descriptive statistics!

1. Know Your Stuff

This one may sound obvious. But you’d be amazed how many times I have seen instructors attempt to “teach” a class by reading the slides back to me.

If you don’t have a deep understanding of the content you’re about to present I suggest you take the time to gain a deep understanding of the material.

In other words, you should have some real life, practical experiences to share with the students.

2. Work the Room

I am not 100% sure what the “presentation police” teach in presentation school… but standing in one spot doesn’t work for me.

I need to move about the room in a fluid manner. I especially like to “work the U” when the students are sitting in a U shaped manner. This allows me to connect with students and make the training more personal and less sterile.

3. Lighten Up

Life is too short to not laugh a bit… so be sure to have some fun.

I mean if I can find ways to make people laugh and smile while teaching them how to calculate sample standard deviation by hand anything is possible!

While not an exact science, I try to find a way to make people smile and preferably laugh every 12 minutes. Research shows that adults need some sort of stimulation every 10 to 15 minutes so do your best to keep them smiling.

4. Speak with Confidence and Passion

This tip is related to tip 1. You see if you really know the material you’re far more likely to speak with confidence and passion. If, however, you’re up there faking it there is little hope you can pull this off.

Speaking with confidence means you NEVER say things like “I believe the answer is…” or “I think you’re right…” or any other wishy washy phrase.

As soon as you use a wishy washy phrase you’ll lose half the room since they’ll believe you don’t know what you’re talking about… which won’t be true if you listen to step 1.

5. Memorize the First Sentence of Each Slide

When I was first learning to teach I would often write out what I wanted to say for each slide. Of course I rarely said these exact words… but the simple fact I at least had a plan gave me a lot of confidence.

So while I don’t propose you “memorize” every word you plan to say it can never hurt to have at least the first sentence or two for each slide on the tip of your tongue.

What do you think?

Do you agree with my list? If you’ve ever done any teaching what techniques have you found to be useful?

As regular readers of this blog know, I am not a big “news” reporting guy.

In other words, I rarely read a news story and then bang out an article around it since, honestly, this type of writing bores me beyond words.

But, unless you live under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard about how Toyota is up against it in a big way making this a bit more than your normal, every day, news.

And then Brian, a reader of the blog, sent me the following email making me feel even more compelled to offer my two cents. Here is what Brian asked.

Ron – What are your thoughts on how Toyota is handling this huge recall? They seem committed to finding root cause (using 8D methods like 5 Whys? etc) since they suspended sales of 8 models. But I think they should have drilled deep to ID root cause & corrective action BEFORE they suspended sales… because the media seems to be grilling Toyota over the “half-baked” plan of suspending sales before recall actions happen. Huge PR black-eye for Toyo, don’t you agree?

I’ve owned Toyota car for many years, luckily our RAV4 is not in the recall this time.

All the best,
Brian

Jidoka

Most lean practitioners understand the concept of Jidoka. It’s a pillar of the Toyota Production System.

The basic premise of jidoka is to immediately stop what you’re doing once an issue has been identified.

At that point, if it’s feasible and safe, a temporary solution may be implemented allowing things to start back up.

Then, a more thorough root cause analysis will be done allowing for a permanent countermeasure to be implemented ensuring the problem never occurs again.

When to Stop the Line?

Now, many are questioning the way Toyota is handling this. Some think they’re crazy for stopping production like they have.

Me, I don’t think they’re crazy at all. In fact, if anything, I think they waited too long.

I am not sure when they first realized the severity of the problem… but I am guessing it was some time ago. So, once the problem was identified I think they should have stopped production then and there.

But, to be fair, perhaps they did stop as quickly as possible. I am there so I don’t want to be too judgmental.

Sticks and Stones

Now, what about the press? Is the Toyota PR team doing the right things?

My guess is Toyota is far more concerned with finding a root cause and implementing a countermeasure then they are about how to spin the press machine.

So, sure, Toyota is feeling the pain right now. Their stock has taken a beating and many of their competitors are jumping for joy.

But it will not surprise me to see Toyota not only survive this devastating issue but also come out of it stronger than ever.

What do you think?

So, I’m curious. What do you think about the way Toyota is handling this problem? Are they doomed to become the next GM begging for bail out money? Or will they come out of this stronger than ever?

As a frequent traveler to the UK I can definitely appreciate this device.  It’s simple, yet profound.  I am not sure if it is available for purchase yet… but if it is I plan to buy one next time I fly across the pond. What do you think of this device? Thumbs up?

I would really appreciate your thoughts on this simple, 2 question survey that should take less than 30 seconds to complete. A big thanks in advance for your time and valuable insight!

Click Here to take survey

If you’d like to see kaizen in action, and I do mean real kaizen, you need to set aside around 23 minutes to watch this video of the FastCap team improving the way some items are packaged.

As an aside, FastCap has been practicing lean for several years and, I’m honored to say, is a customer of Gemba Academy!

Please note: If you are reading this via email or your RSS reader you’ll likely need to click through to the website.

Kaizen – FastCap Style from FastCap on Vimeo.

See a demonstration of Kaizen… FastCap style.

John Hunter recently commented that he owns some Toyota stock. And since I value John’s wisdom I decided to take a look at the TM chart to see what it looked like.

Now, before I go any further, let me be crystal clear… I am not offering any financial advice and, at least for now, I am not an owner of Toyota stock. I do own two Toyota vehicles though… and LOVE them but I digress. Oh, and Toyota also has a rocking production system but, again, I’m digressing!

Fun with Technical Analysis

Anyhow, I used to mess around trading stocks. And since I’ve studied things like technical analysis I thought it might be kind of fun to track Toyota’s stock from a technical perspective.

Let me also say that I am far from an expert at this and would love nothing more than to hear your opinions of what you see and what you think will happen.

My Take on the TM Stock

Anyhow, here is my first take on what I see… keeping it real simple for now. In the future I may pull out some fun stuff like Fibonacci retracements and MACD crossovers… but for today’s lesson we’ll look at some simple support and resistance lines.

If you click on the chart you’ll notice that this stock had been on a steady downward trend bouncing between a nice little “channel” that I’ve manually drawn in.

Then, the stock was crushed in early October of 2008 as Toyota failed to impress the street with their FY 2009 Guidance.

After this beating the stock gyrated sideways finding support around $60 (point A). It also, interestingly enough, found resistance at what used to be a support line (point B). Isn’t this stuff intriguing?

Anyhow, in April of this year the stock finally managed to bust back into the channel only to meet the same downward trending resistance (point C) which forced it back down.

What’s Next?

From a purely technical perspective the biggest question mark I have is whether or not the stock will find support at around $68 (point D). If it does, it could possibly see a bullish bounce up… but, AGAIN, I am not offering any financial advice here. I’m just a nerd who loves to look at charts.

What do you think?

What do you think? Are you bullish or bearish on Toyota’s stock? Do you see anything else on their chart I might be missing?

I used to check my website stats several times a day.  I’ll admit, I had a problem… but I’m guessing most bloggers have similar issues when first starting out.

Well, I’m happy to say that I now check my website stats about once a week.  And I check my “ebook stats” about once every two months since they’re found on another website.

Time to Check Some Stats

Well, it had been a few months since I had logged in to see how many people had downloaded the LSS Academy Guide to Lean ebook so I recently checked it out.

I logged into my Aweber account and started digging around.  After a few minutes I came upon some graphs I had never seen before.

After some more digging and clicking I came upon the graph to the left (click to enlarge it).

Upon first glance (the arrows weren’t there) I was fairly pleased with the nice slope.  But the more I looked at it the more I felt like something was unique about the slope.  It seemed like it intensified around November of last year.

Time for Minitab

Well, being the lean six sigma nerd that I am… I decided to export the data into Minitab for some serious data analysis.  I applied some formulas in order to graph the number of new ebook downloads per month.

With this data I then created the Individuals and Moving Range Chart to the left (click to enlarge).

Well, as you can clearly see something definitely “happened” around November of 2008.  And while our website traffic has consistently grown, month over month, it hasn’t grown this much in one month.

Something else had to be happening.  But what?  Then I remembered!

Design Changes Make an Impact!

Late last November I had my web design guy make a small tweak to the LSS Academy site.  The tweak had to do with the ebook sign-up form.  Basically I had him enlarge it.  I also paid a guy a few bucks to design a really slick cover for the ebook.

Well, it would seem that these small changes made a rather significant difference to the number of ebook downloads.

Data Analysis Lesson

Aside from being a good lesson on how important things like web design can be to a website’s performance, this experience also taught me how important it is to properly analyze data.

Some folks may have stopped after looking at the first graph… but it wasn’t until the second graph, with control limits in place, that we could be sure that something truly significant occured.

Free Control Chart Training

If you’d like to learn more about control charts, and don’t want to spend a dime, please check out these articles I’ve dusted off from the archives.

• Control Charts Part 1: In this article I explain what control charts are, their history, why control limits are +/- 3 standard deviations from the mean.
• Control Charts Part 2: Attribute data – p chart, c chart, u chart
• Control Charts Part 3: Variable data – I MR charts

What about you?

How else would you have looked at my data?  Have you used control charts successfully in your place of work?  And what about my fellow bloggers… have any of you thrown your data into Minitab for a little fun?

While it has nothing to do with lean or six sigma this was just too good to not share.

My 4 year old daughter recently asked my wife, “Mommy, does Spiderman take away the sins of the world?”

Sure, they ‘cost’ a lot of money… but to me… kids are priceless!

Enjoy your weekend – and especially your children – if applicable.

Did you know that 50% of all leaders are below average? It’s a fact.

With this said, a good friend of mine recently asked me what I thought the Standard Work document would look like for a “Leader.”

In other words, if you could list out the things a leader of people would do, on a consistent basis, what would it be?

I definitely have some ideas and, yes, I realize it is literally impossible to cover all aspects of leadership in a single Standard Work document… but I contend it’s worth a shot.

Over to you

So, dear readers, I’d like to hear what you think. If you were to create a “Leadership Standard Work” document or process what would it look like?

Update:  Please read part 2 of this article here.

The human brain fascinates me. As such, I was very excited to finally read Brain Rules by John Medina.

In this book Medina proposes 12 different rules, that once understood, may help us all to be happier and more productive individuals.

Here is a quick summary of the 12 rules. At the end of the article will be an awesome slide show created by Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen fame.

• Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power. Medina proposes that the most effective meetings would be ones where all attendees walked 1.8 miles per hour.

• Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too. Medina proposes, “There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and cubicle.”

• Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently. Each time we learn something our brain is literally re-wired. Medina also claims the categories of intelligence may number more than 7 billion!

• Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things. Microsoft is to blame for this as their famous “PowerPoint” software has resulted in far more boring meetings than anyone should have to deal with. Stop reading the slides man!

• Rule #5: Repeat to remember. As powerful as they are, most human brains can only hold around seven pieces of information for less than 30 seconds. To remember we must repeat things… a lot.

• Rule #6: Remember to repeat. Medina claims that our schools are currently designed so that most real learning has to occur at home.

• Rule #7: Sleep well, think well. In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performance by 34 percent.

• Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way. Medina claims that the emotional stability of our homes plays a huge part in how our children learn.

• Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses. Ever wonder why, if you like coffee, walking into a Starbucks makes you feel happy? Smell. That’s why.

• Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses. Bullet points are so 1998… use images and simple phrases to get your point across in your presentations.

• Rule #11: Male and female brains are different. Show a man a slasher film and his right brain lights up… while a woman’s left brain goes into overdrive. Same movie, different reactions.

• Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers. We humans love to explore and learn new things even if crammed inside a cubicle 40 hours a week!