New Book. A handful of weeks ago, SME published our new book, Lean Math: Figuring to Improve. It is, and was, undoubtedly a labor of love…or at least the 444-page labor of Dr. Mike (aka Michael O’Connor) and me. I invite you to download a free chapter (see the sidebar on the right), along with the accompanying cover, pre-pages and four example math entries to get insight into the book’s purpose, approach, and content and what other lean practitioners think about the work.
My original vision for the book was one of relatively low effort for me (I was worn out after writing the Kaizen Event Fieldbook) and one of high utility for all those lean practitioners who had something better to do than constantly re-invent or re-research the lean math wheel every time they had to size a kanban. It sounded like a perfect combination!
Of course, the low effort notion was TOTALLY misguided. Lean actually requires a ton of math. The more I dwelled on the lean mathematical landscape, the more it seemed to expand. Eventually, I decided I needed a co-author because, frankly, the scope was too darn big AND I needed someone a lot smarter than me to write all of that hard six sigma stuff. And then there’s the need for precision, imagine that(!) …and the use of realistic examples.
There were times that Dr. Mike and I were sure we knew how Napoleon felt during his disastrous invasion of Russia during 1812. As in, this is a really, really, bad idea and we’ll be lucky if some of us, any of us, ever get back home.
Anyway, eventually we, including our publisher, SME, thought it would be a good idea to stop writing (that’s why Lean Math is ONLY 444 pages) even though there are certainly other areas to explore. We sincerely think that this work will help you on your lean journey. Please, as previously mentioned, download the free chapter et al and decide for yourself.
New Look. One thing that you may notice is that this website has a brand new look! We’ve revamped the menu, graphics, and offerings. We hope that you will agree that the changes are an improvement to the user experience. This leads us to the promise of…
New Content. What good is a new look without new content? So, here’s a promise from us that we’ll be getting fresh content on this site with some regularity. This also includes expanding our inventory of free templates.
We sincerely hope that we can continue to make Lean Math a useful destination for the lean practitioner.
