Aaron U. Bolin, Ph.D.

We had a stellar Green Belt class last week. We set a new world record for accurate ping pong balls shot with a catapult in 5 minutes. Team Cinco Amigos (pictured here) hit 210 of 233 shots, breaking the old record of 198 hits. However, the overall profit title went to Team Bombs-R-Us, and the overall yield title went to Team Acme Missiles with 98.4 percent accuracy (3.7 Sigma quality). Team Dead Eye was a honorable mention for also breaking the old world record with 201 of 212 shots. Everyone got A's for the day. Although Cinco Amigos produced the most hits, they also produced 10% waste and finished behind some of the other teams in other performance areas. The cross-team comparison made me rethink how I emphasize the various instructional points in the curriculum. Because I used the idea of breaking the old world record to introduce the concept of process entitlement, I think I may have encouraged the teams to focus exclusively on productivity measures to the exclusion of qual

Building Organizational Intelligence by Jay Liebowitz My rating: 2 of 5 stars View all my reviews "Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating value from an organization's intangible assets" - Jay Liebowitz "Knowledge is information with a process applied to it" - Jay Liebowitz "Many organizations are drowning in information and starving for knowledge" - Jay Liebowitz I never thought of lean six sigma as a knowledge management technique until know. After reading Liebowitz's introductory chapters, I have a little insight into the overlap and connections between the allied disciplines. I didn't really enjoy the book -- I thought it was light on useful content -- but it definitely made me think.

One of my tasks at work recently was to measure organizational learning. "How would I know if my organization is a learning organization," I wondered? Training activity seemed to be the most common answer. The logic is easy to refute when simply stated: If we offer a lot of training opportunities and a lot of people attend, then we must be a learning organization. The evidence of individual learning is a change in behavior, or at least a change in the behavioral options available. But how does that translate to the organizational level? With just a little bit of background reading (thank you Peter Senge), I came up with a tentative checklist. It still needs some refinement, but here it is: 1. Does the organization have a shared vision; does everyone know what it is and how their actions support it? 2. Is personal mastery expected; are learning and growth required of individuals in the organization? 3. Does the organization utilized team-based approaches to learn