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AllAboutLean.com
Company blog · allaboutlean.combusinessproductivity
AllAboutLean.com is the company blog at allaboutlean.com, writing about business and productivity. Since 2016, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link AllAboutLean for lean manufacturing history and practices, such as Toyota's Takumi craftsmen, pointing and calling, TWI job instruction, and industrial espionage in the Industrial Revolution.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The #1 Lean Manufactruing Blog. Our Portfolio: AllAboutLean Academy, Lean Management Consulting, Lean Coaching and Lean Benchmarking!
What Hacker News says?
It seems like many of these TQM discussion miss one key factor of TPS. Respect. Engineers and management respect line workers. They have a word for the expert line workers, ("craftsmen"), Takumi. https://www.allaboutlean.com/toyotas-takumi/ and Takumi have a valued place in the company. Without that basic level of respect... i dunno.. seems like it wont work
Comment linking /toyotas-takumi/
on “Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]”Submitted A Eulogy for Little's Law as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLaziness situates the problem in individuals and as a deep characteristic, and I think neither is true. Normally when I see ineffective meetings and missing communications, it's an organizational culture issue. The number one cause I see is what the Lean people call "overburden". I know somebody who was a big fan of circulating notes and tried to bring that practice to a new job. But they ended up giving up because…
Comment linking /push-pull/
on “No, we won’t have a video call for that”Submitted The Toyoda Model G Loom as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBritain used industrial espionage to gather the technology to reach their industrial revolution. The USA did it in turn. (It used to be a death sentence for skilled technologists to emigrate.) https://www.allaboutlean.com/industrial-espionage-and-revolu... https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
Comment linking /industrial-espionage-and-revolution/
on “ToTok, an Emirati messaging app, is the latest escalation of a digital arms race”Submitted Japanese Standard Pointing and Calling: Railway Company Safety as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe problem is, the propaganda was all just propaganda in the end. Yes, we got cheap trinkets out of China, but at what price? Insane amounts of economic devastation, as none of the promised benefits other than said cheap trinkets materialized. None of the countries that "change by trade" ("Wandel durch Handel") targeted became democratic, and instead of "trickle down of wealth" we got a "trickle down of shit and ex…
Comment linking /hoshin-kanri-3/bird-shit-hierarchy/
on “Striking auto workers want a 40% pay increase–the same rate their CEOs’ pay grew”It might sound dumb to you but your solution is used by Japanese train engineers before leaving at a station and trains in Japan are really efficient and on-schedule. https://www.allaboutlean.com/pointing-and-calling/
Comment linking /pointing-and-calling/
on “A Life-Saving Checklist (2007)”The first and most important question of course is to understand that having too much WIP is in fact bad. This is a well-understood concept in factories. Not enough people today have ever been in a factory. It's a classic problem with manufacturing plants that make a large number of different items. There, it's obvious - you have racks or piles or bins of partially finished product sitting around. Yet you can't avoi…
Comment linking /lot-size-part-1/
on “Limiting Work in Progress (2020)”If you’re referring to this part of the comment: > First we show them, then we explain to them what we did, then they try it with supervision (this is where most of my learning occurs), then we let them do it without supervision. It strikes me as coming close to the TWI job instruction training method [1] the US developed in the 40’s to train workers for war production. [1] https://www.allaboutlean.com/twi-job-instr…
Comment linking /twi-job-instructions/
on “Updated Concept of “The Surgical Team””
