Tag: Sports

If you're not a baseball fan, I apologize for a second baseball-themed post this week. Baseball has a lot of historical time-series data to work with and analyze. If you're not interested in "Process Behavior Charts" or similar methods, I guess I will apologize for this post again too. Next, I'll be apologizing for apologizing. But, I am at Dr. Wheeler's four-day workshop on "Understanding Statistical Process Control" as I blogged about on Monday. It's great to learn from Dr. Wheeler in person and I'll be sharing reflections on the class in a later post (and I'm posting a few things on LinkedIn along the way). In Chapter 1 of Understanding Variation, Dr. Wheeler points out how charts or graphs are far superior to tables or lists of numbers. He uses a baseball example:

I recently saw this headline: Baseball on pace for lowest batting average since 1972 Just because it's the lowest average in 48 years... it doesn't mean that this year's MLB-wide batting average is low in a way that's statistically meaningful.

Here is my latest article that I published on LinkedIn: Is the Reported Drop in Major League Baseball Attendance a "Signal" or "Noise" in the Data?

Back in 2014, I wrote an article for The Lean Post: "Standardization is a Countermeasure, Never the Goal" I'm a big fan of Taiichi Ohno's advice to "start from need." I cringe when I hear people say that we should standardize the way work is done "because Lean says so." There's no substitute for judgment in the grey areas related to standardized work. What should we standardize? For what purpose? How standardized should the work be? Baseball is struggling with questions like this... how standardized should the balls be... and for what purpose?

I first learned about an approach to personal development called "The Harada Method" when Norman Bodek co-authored a book with Takashi Harada: The Harada Method: The Spirit of Self-Reliance. Norman was a guest on my podcast in 2013 to talk about this... The Harada Method has been on mind again recently thanks to the success of Major League Baseball player Shohei Ohtani, from Japan.

Tonight is the start of the NFL Draft, which almost gets as much coverage nowadays as a Presidential election. Can you imagine if CNBC and other TV channels spent as much time focusing on which Lean Healthcare prospects would be "drafted" from our leading universities and medical schools? Here is our exclusive and official Lean Blog mock draft, featuring picks from our Lean Healthcare draft expert, Mel Kaizen, Jr.

As you might know, I have always enjoyed baseball and like blogging about ideas and statistics that come from the sport. I loved this recent article from The Wall Street Journal and there are parallels to Lean and being an effective change agent: "The Data Wonk Who Became a Coach"

Are minor league games taking longer? Well, yes and no, depending on the league. My next book, Measures of Success, is about the use of this Process Behavior Chart methodology in the workplace, as applied to our performance measures.  This post explores some data, how asking for more data can be more helpful, and how to use charts to evaluate a metric over time.

Last week, I saw a headline about a drop in NCAA college football attendance. I wasn't satisfied with the two data point comparisons or other written descriptions of the metrics. I wanted to see data. SHOW ME THE DATA, JERRY! (with apologies to "Jerry Maguire"). I wanted to see a chart. So, I found the data on to NCAA website and created "process behavior charts" that tell you much more about the data than text numbers ever could.

Today's blog post -- it's not just about sports, it's about managing and measuring improvement...

If you watched this year's World Series, you saw a lot of home runs. There were many dramatic home runs in late innings or...

I've blogged about football before - I should say "American football," since I have many international readers. I should say I've blogged about events on the football field and the approaches of football coaches that remind me of Lean thinking. Here are a few of those thoughts from last weekend -- topics include "lack of urgency," "that's not my job," and "the process."