Author Archive: Michael Ballé
Michael is associate researcher at Telecom ParisTech, and holds a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Social Sciences and Knowledge Sciences. For the past fifteen years, he has focused on lean transformation as part of his research on knowledge-based performance and organizational learning. He has written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored two business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine and one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager. He is a leading expert on lean transformation initiatives, and an engaging and colorful public speaker, experienced in running interactive workshops with large audiences. Michael is co-founder of the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France.
The Psychology of Lean Management
When was the last time you remember thinking “I was wrong about this”? Yesterday? Last week? Never? Let’s conduct a short thought experiment: force yourself to think of an instance, any instance, where you were clearly wrong. How does it feel? Are you already lining up the mitigating circumstances (anyone would have done the same [...]
Lean Leadership – Knowledge Productivity for the 21st Century
What would Peter Drucker have to say about this? This is a question I have asked myself often, particularly when stumped with a situation that didn’t fit anyone’s expectations. I remember reading Post-Capitalist Society fifteen years ago, just as I was completing my first business book, Managing With Systems Thinking, and I remain, to this day, in awe [...]
Who Teaches the Teachers?
I was recently walking through a factory shop floor that was essentially a machining shop (20-odd mills, drills and turns of varying age and design) with one small assembly cell stuck at the end of the hall. In this cell, the local lean team had worked very hard at implementing all the lean tools and [...]
