General Electric has played a significant role in the modern conversation about Lean, leadership, and operational excellence—especially through GE Aerospace and the leadership of Larry Culp. These posts examine how Lean thinking shows up (or fails to) inside a large, complex organization, with a focus on leadership behavior, safety, problem-solving, and culture.
Rather than treating Lean as a program or toolkit, this archive looks at GE through a systems lens: how leaders talk about improvement, how they respond to problems and mistakes, and whether daily management reinforces learning or blame. The emphasis is on what other organizations can realistically learn from GE’s successes, struggles, and evolution.
Today’s post is an interview I conducted via email with Justin Holland, Managing Principal of GE Healthcare Americas. Before joining GE, he was most recently Vice President of Business Performance at Cleveland Clinic. In this interview we cover topics including…
In recent years, healthcare has been learning a lot of lessons from aviation — including checklists and “Crew Resource Management,” as written about in the excellent books The Checklist Manifesto and Why Hospitals Should Fly. Aviation has gotten much…
My blog saw a spike in traffic again this week–likely driven by people searching for “30 Rock Jack Welch” following his unforgettable appearance on the show. Many are finding an old post I wrote back in 2006. So I thought…
No. Toyota’s factories do not run a formal Six Sigma program, and they do not hand out belts. What Toyota does teach, broadly and without much ceremony, is basic quality control and statistical thinking, the kind of tools that predate…
Guest Columnist – Quality Digest Wow, this is pretty bad… allegedly about GE. Granted, any dysfunctional Lean company could end up with similar dynamics. So none of this is knock on Six Sigma… it’s about human nature and organizational dynamics.…
by Jamie Flinchbaugh, co-author, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean What’s the purpose of thinking about work as a value stream? Is it just a buzzword? It helps us identify how our activities connect and flow together in order to deliver…
GE’s CEO controls information worth billions – July 21, 2008 It’s always interesting to read about GE’s shift from a Six Sigma company to a Lean Six Sigma company. Their CIO, Gary Reiner, is responsible for their Lean Six Sigma…
Networks Plot Course – WSJ.com As the entertainment industry works to recover from the recently-ended writers’ strike, the WSJ article featured a quote from a division of General Electric: “[the networks] are hoping to maintain some of the cost-cutting benefits…
Technology Review: “You Don’t Understand Our Audience” It’s just one part of a very interesting article in the MIT magazine by John Hockenberry, a former reporter for NBC news. NBC (and NBC Universal) are a part of the General Electric…
An interview with P&G and GE CEOs Lafley and Immelt – December 11, 2006: I saw this yesterday and it jumped out at me, from a FORTUNE magazine interview with Proctor & Gamble’s CEO, A.G. Lafley and GE’s Jeff Immelt:…
NBC’s 30 Rock gave us another gem of workplace satire in its first season–this time blending reverence, absurdity, and a strange reference to fruit. In one scene, corporate executive Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin) delivers another over-the-top line of…
We know Dilbert makes fun of Six Sigma, but the new NBC show “30 Rock” does a great job of skewering GE culture (of which NBC is a part) and Six Sigma. 30 Rock is easily the funniest workplace show…
