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Explorers Foundation ••• (home page)

all glyphs (fragments of Freeorder) •••

Investments ••• a table of all investments

freeorder ••• the concept & vision

28Mar20: Charles G. Koch’s Good Profit

24Sep11: Steve Elliott recommends the work of Ken Miller.

20Aug11 : Governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, explains how to manage a budget (9 Dec 10; no longer findable 11/26/16)

26Apr11 : "Accomplishing More with Less, Instead of Doing More with Less", Executive Leadership Group

SLIM

Lean Government is a systematic process that makes customers happy by listening to them. It makes local governments more efficient and effective by empowering employees to develop better ways to perform their processes. Rinse. Repeat.

Increase value – eliminate waste. Who decides how and what to change? The people who do the work. They know it best. How do you know it works? You measure carefully before and after to monitor the changes. Things like:

None of the things on the muda list are things the customer wants to pay for. The way you track muda is through Value Stream Mapping; tracking a process from beginning to end. At each step, ask the question: “Does this add value for the customer?”

Summary:

Lean uses a set of tools including flowcharts, Pareto Charts, Metrics Summaries, Project Charts, Kaizen Events and six sigma tools. It isn’t the tool that makes the difference, it is the attitude and the new way of looking at processes that makes the difference. Now the good part: when you tune up a system, you save money, you save time, you provide better service, and you take fewer steps to accomplish more with less inventory.

Who is using Lean and what kind of results are they getting? Check out http://lean.iowa.gov/results/index.html

Steve Elliott was the Chief Deputy Treasurer for Boulder County. He is happy to give his introduction to LEAN to any local government agency or department at no cost. The presentation takes about an hour and a half with questions. Comes with a reading list and a list of web links to other governments using Lean. (303) 651-1964; stevekelliott at gmail doot com

Steve Elliott, 01/15/09I've put together a short reading list.

Lean Thinking, by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones. Copyright 2003, Free Press. A good overview of Lean Thinking - but definitely aimed at manufacturing.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Lean, Lessons from the Road, by Jamie Flinchbaugh and Andy Carlino. Copyright 2006 Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Again - aimed at manufacturing, but some of the best real-life examples of how to overcome problems usually passed over in other books trying to champion a new methodology. Things like: where do we start? how do you overcome resistance; and managing expectations.

Office Kaizen, by William Lareau, Copyright 2003 American Society for Quality. This is the book that translates manufacturing into service and describes how to identify lean concepts in an office environment. Waste in the office is waiting for a return phone call, a signature, or an assignment to create a report that isn't needed.

The Change Agent's Guide to Radical Improvement, by Ken Miller. Copyright 2002 by American Society for Quality. This is a handbook. Chock full of exercises, templates forms, and step by step instructions for how to work your way through implementing lean in your organization.

We Don't Make Widgets, Overcoming the Myths that Keep Government from Radically Improving, by Ken Miller. Copyright 2006, Governing Books. I've ordered a copy, but I haven't read it yet.

More later!

Steve

I’m presenting a week-long class on Lean Government the week of October 15th in Longmont, Colorado. I’ve got 11 folks from Boulder County signed up, but the room will hold 20, so I’m opening it up to all and sundry. No charge, free lunch. Please feel free to spread the word and contact me for more information/syllabus, etc. selliott@bouldercounty.org

Graduates of this class will be able to organize and lead groups of employees through Kaizen (change for the better) events that take apart any process, analyze where the waste is, remove the waste and put it back together again. In Boulder County we were able to reduce the time to generate a Certificate of Taxes Due (one of the papers you sign when you buy or sell a house) from 72 hours to 4. The Land Use department reduced the time it took to issue a building permit in the mountains from 9 weeks to 3. All done with the current staff using the techniques this class will teach.

"Complexity versus Lean" ••• — a slideshow by Jurgen Appelo. Beautifully done, thought provoking and a pleasure to navigate through the 92 slides. (thanks to Flemming Funch)

On October 25, 2010, Alan Shalloway, CEO, Net Objectives, posted: "Great talk on CAS [Complex Adaptive Systems]. Total mis-representation of Lean. I would not consider even one of the negative representation of Lean in this presentation to be accurate. I no of no Lean Software thought leader who would say your representations of Lean are correct. Having merely read books does not make one an expert. A better title would have been - using CAS to understand why misunderstandings of Lean are false." ••• (Alan's entire comment, posted to the Net Objectives blog)

"Complexity & Economics - How societies emerge and grow prosperous", videos by Max Borders — this is a remarkable reduction of the complex to the very simple ••• — "Learn about the relationship between complex, emergent orders and the forms of organization that give rise to them."

Office forPerformance Improvement, University of Colorado •••

Office of Lean Enterprise, Iowa Department of Management •••

Bend the Curve, Maine Department of Labor •••

Executive Leadership Group ••• (Bill Casey & Wendi Peck)

Breakthroughs: How the vision and drive of innovators in sixteen companies created commercial breakthroughs that swept the world, by Nayak & Ketteringham, based on an international study of innovation by Arthur D. Little, Inc., Rawson Associates: New York, 1986, contains a chapter on the creation of the Toyota Production System, one of the fountainheads of lean management. ISBN 0-89256-294-3. This is a book of uncommon interest and usefulness to explorers in business. -leif smith

Aurora, Colorado, Takes a look at opening the city books — Denver Post, July 6, 2009 •••

2016 Lean Six Sigma Conference, March 2-3, Phoenix, Arizona

Colonel David Crockett has his say, “Not Yours to Give” •••

Steve Elliott, Leif Smith, Jim Bennett, Pat Wagner, Bill Casey, Wendi Peck

To be invited: Barbara Johnson, Spencer MacCallum, Jim Zelenski, Brad Hughes, Liz Gardener, Brad Hughes, Duane Knight, Jerry Mallett

Steve Elliott introduced the topic of this vortex, January 2009.

Pat Wagner, who just signed up with this, recommends "Vortex Crockett", after Colonel David Crockett because of the attitude toward the money of the citizens reflected in his "Not Yours to Give" speech.

Steve, Pat's suggestion of "Crockett" is just a proposal; what do you think? 1/8/09

ok - Pat's suggestion was excellent, but was overwhelmed by those in favor of Vortex Slim. Davy will continue to be honored as someone who has deeply inspired Slim's work. 1/8/09 11:09 AM

Pat has a number of workshops and online courses that bear on efficient and civil government.