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Episode Directory

May 2012

  • 5/15/2012: Fractals, Monkeys & Morphogenic Fields Listen Now
  • 5/8/2012: Global Improvement Snapshots: Trip Notes Listen Now
  • 5/1/2012: The Four Power Levels of Visual Devices (part 2) (for May 1) Listen Now

April 2012

March 2012

February 2012

January 2012

December 2011

November 2011

October 2011

September 2011

Brent R. Allen

Brent R. Allen has been in a leadership position at Lifetime Products, Inc. for over 30 years, the last 20 years as VP of Operations. Graduating Weber State College in 1974, he was a Special Education Teacher/Football Coach for seven years before joining American Playworld in 1981, a small Utah manufacturer. In 1986, when Lifetime Products was formed, Mr. Allen became VP of Operations and helped Lifetime become a leading supplier of residential basketball systems, folding utility tables, and polyethylene sheds. In 2005, he added Supply Chain Development and Strategic Improvement to his roles, committing to implement lean and visual across the company’s 22 buildings and 1500 employees. In 2010, Mr. Allen was trained in Work That Makes Sense/Operator-Led Visuality. He then trained two consecutive groups of operators himself to ensure that he thoroughly understood the visual workplace paradigm, instructional content, and conversion methodology before he mandated its implementation. View Guest page

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Stewart Bellamy

Stewart Bellamy, Quality Assurance and Lean Manager at Brandt Engineered Products Ltd. (Canada), has been in the fabrication industry for over three decades. In his 15 years at Brandt, Stewart has been deeply engaged in process improvement, quality assurance, and lean enterprise initiatives. Under his leadership, Brandt began to actively implement the visual workplace in its Regina facility in 2007, five years after initiating lean. Now in 2011, that effort continues and widens, with Stewart and his team deploying visual and lean systems across more than twenty Brandt Tractor dealerships in Western Canada. About Brandt: Based in Regina, Canada and founded over 75 years ago, the Brandt Group consists of five companies, with 22 sites and some 1300 employees. The company specializes in a diverse range of custom-engineered heavy-equipment products and services, with markets in Canada, US, Europe, Australia, South America, and Asia. For more, visit: www.brandt.ca View Guest page

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Barry Freeman

Barry Freeman has 18 years experience in manufacturing, 13 years as a production manager at a water treatment products factory and the past three years at Brandt as the Paint and Assembly Manager. When asked about his philosophy of continuous improvement, Mr. Freeman replied: “I believe in people. I don’t have strong mechanical skills. Burt I’m good at working with people. Fair and organized. Not demanding, I provide structure so people know what to expect. I train them on the principles and then lead them to come up with the solutions on their own. I insist that the thirty people who report to me spend time on improvement….15 minutes a day, every day. My philosophy is that the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence; it is greener where it is watered. It is up to us to water our own grass. How? By recognizing problems and eliminating them ourselves.” Mr. Freeman is also a hockey coach, an avid fisherman, and a writer, the author of Double Dog Dare Ya. View Guest page

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C. Martin Hinckley

C. Martin Hinckley, Ph.D., has extensive experience on design projects requiring the highest levels of quality and reliability. Under his leadership, new products were developed at a fraction of traditional costs. In one case, the first prototype of a major subsystem was assembled virtually defect-free in one-seventh the time initially projected. Part counts were dramatically reduced and many of the parts were procured at one-tenth the cost of original estimates. Most fixtures were eliminated, and among those that were not, the cost of fixtures was reduced a hundred-fold. Dr. Hinckley is author of “Make No Mistake” (Productivity Press, 2001), has a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering. He is president of Assured Quality, a firm dedicated to helping companies break excessive dependence on Statistical Quality Control and begin to rely instead on powerful and cost effective mistake-proofing techniques. For more, visit: www.assuredquality.com View Guest page

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Patricia E. Moody

Patricia E. Moody is author/co-author of hundreds of articles, and over a dozen books on manufacturing, the technology interface of better business practices, and strategic sourcing. Ms. Moody’s client list includes British Petroleum, Honda, Tyco, HP, Motorola, and Johnson & Johnson. She discovered her love of technology when her father took her, age three, to a local paper mill to see vats of (as she recalls) smelly horrifying mess. She fell in love and manufacturing became a family obsession. Ms. Moody holds an MBA and Honorary Doctorate, has taught at undergraduate and graduate levels, and is a frequent keynote speaker. Named a manufacturing hero by Fortune Magazine for her role in saving Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol Poisoning Crisis, she serves on the boards of Inside Supply Management, Sloan Management Review, and Ketera Technologies. She lives on Boston’s North Shore with her husband and can be reached through her website: www.patriciaemoody.com View Guest page

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Carol M. Shaw

Across her innovative career, Carol Shaw has been a pioneer in the rebirth of manufacturing in the United States. Professor Shaw founded—and for twenty years led—The Center for Competitive Change at the University of Dayton (Ohio). Partnering with such thought leaders as Chirkio Nakao (Shingijutsu Group), the Kaizen Institute, William Laureau (American Samurai), and Gwendolyn Galsworth (Visual Workplace/Visual Thinking). Professor Shaw developed a training curriculum and certification program in lean and visual that trained over 25,000 managers. The Center completed some 3,000 on-site consulting and conversion projects, with workplace visuality as a foundation on many of them. Most recently as Professor Emeritus of Engineering Management, Carol conducts seminars and classes on lean and visual thinking as part of UD’s engineering and business curriculum. She is currently in the process of writing a new book, Moments of Truth: Caught in the Turnstile of Work and Other Things I Learned Along the Way. View Guest page

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Fractals, Monkeys & Morphogenic Fields

May 15, 2012
Hosted by Gwendolyn D. Galsworth, Ph.D.

[Download MP3] [itunes] [Bookmark Episode]

Strange how most of us believe change happens. Strange how we believe companies learn and improve. Stranger yet is how we seek to validate the progress we think we’re making by attending to exact technical causes and the concrete logic of the physical. But what if an entirely different set of causes pertain and an all-but-undetectable logic produces these tangible, knowable outcomes? Suddenly reality ain’t what it used to be—or is supposed to be. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes you into the world of chaos theory, fractals, and morphogenic fields, sharing research on how companies evolve and learning happens, based on the largest gap in understanding that exists: “what we don’t know we don’t know.” Tune in and you may be surprised to learn that even monkeys can point the way to what’s really going on when we learn, implement, and improve. This is a live show. Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed!

The Visual Workplace: Work That Makes Sense

Tuesday at 4 PM Pacific Time on VoiceAmerica Business Channel

You’ve heard of the visual workplace. But do you really know what that means? And do you know the crucial role it plays in operational excellence? The Visual Workplace: Work That Makes Sense offers the best in practical tools, methods, and strategies for improvement leaders who want to apply workplace visuality and harness its remarkable cultural and bottom line contribution. Visuality: you can’t get to excellence without it. Each week, award-winning author and foremost visual workplace expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, targets new learning and applications through a range of formats—case studies, interviews with business leaders and topic experts, and interaction through listener call-ins and Q&A. Whether yours is a factory, hospital, military depot, bank, office or dry cleaners—get informed, get inspired, get visual. Listen to The Visual Workplace: Work That Makes Sense, airing live every Tuesday at 4 PM Pacific Time on the VoiceAmerica Business Channel.

Gwendolyn D. Galsworth, Ph.D.

Across 30 years of hands-on implementations, Gwendolyn Galsworth, Ph.D. has nearly single-handedly created the models, concepts, and methods of workplace visuality that define visual’s distinct and powerful contribution to enterprise excellence—and to sustainable cultural and bottom line results. Dr. Galsworth is president and founder of Quality Methods International (QMI), a training, research, and consulting firm—and the QMI/Visual-Lean® Institute, where you can get trained in nine core visual workplace courses. A Shingo Prize Examiner, Gwendolyn is the author of many DVDs and books, including Visual Workplace/Visual Thinking and Work That Makes Sense, both winners of the coveted Shingo Research Prize. Her on-demand webinars and off-the-shelf training packages are rich in content and insight, each containing scores of actual visual solutions. (For more information or to make a purchase, visit www.visualworkplace.com.) Most importantly, she has honed and tested her work in companies around the world—factories, banks, hospitals, military depots, and offices—including Lockheed-Martin, Pratt/Whitney, Royal Nooteboom Trailers/Holland, Trailmobile/Canada, Bank of America, Midwest Cancer Centers, Rolls-Royce/UK, Crompton Greaves/India, Sears, United Electric Controls, and Wilson Transformer/Australia. When not on-site with clients, delivering keynotes or teaching at the Institute, Gwendolyn can be found hiking—or working on her next book.

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