Lean Enterprise Institute has a blog now.  I was waiting for them to start one up.  John Shook is the primary author (maybe only?).  You can find it at http://www.lean.org/shook/.

Just before Thanksgiving, Kevin Meyer shared this great post (and I’ve been passing along to others) on how American Apparel continues to succeed.  On a related note, I mentor high school students and for some odd reason we were talking about favorite T-shirts earlier this week and one student commented, “I love American Apparel shirts.”  So, wow, not only do they run a good company, but they’re also hip (“hip” is really probably a very outdated term…I think we’re way past “dope”, “the bomb”, and “fly” too so I’m not sure what to call it)!

A few perspectives on the Big 3: one from Jon Miller of Gemba Panta Rei: “With Competitors Like These, Who Needs a Winning Business Strategy?” and another from Tom Peters entitled “Service?  Sacrifice?  Equity?  Honor?” and one final one expressed in the cartoon below:

cars

I guess this one isn’t necessarily directly manufacturing related, but I’ve been enjoying Mark J Perry’s economic analysis from his blog.  He’s a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan.  He also shares some amusing items, including this road map to “success” (shown below) and this bailout application.

cartooncars

Incidentally, I share a lot of this stuff on http://friendfeed.com/scottsorheim which is a great place to have a discussion about these items, and I would be glad to follow you on Twitter…you can find me at http://twitter.com/scottsorheim.  Hopefully see you there!

UPDATE: John Shook weighs in on the LEI blog on the Big 3 and provides this interesting insight: “GM wants to survive, all right, it wants to survive so it can continue to make money. Toyota on the other hand, wants to make money to survive.”

Also, I’ve often thought I’ve used my lean background in meeting customer needs with software, but beginning next week, we’ll see what I really know about lean methodology as applied to software as I start attending their Lean On-line Learning for Lean Software Development.