Lean Blog: Sports
Lean Blog: Sports
Lean Concepts in Sports and Lean Lessons from the Sports World
About the Book
This e-Book is a collection of posts from Mark Graban's LeanBlog.org that focus on Lean concepts found in professional and college sports, as well as Lean lessons from players, coaches, and other leaders that can be applied in our own workplaces.
The posts have been freshly edited and updated, with updated links and new reflections being added at the end of some posts. Content has been organized into sections for different sports: baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and miscellaneous.
What can David Stern and the NBA, Rex Ryan of the New York Jets, and the Atlanta Braves teach us about Lean leadership? What can we learn about Lean by observing the beer concession stands or other stadium operations? What does a missing Olympic hockey puck teach us about problem solving? Read this book to find out.
The book is the equivalent of 266 pages in paperback form.
It can also be purchased in the Amazon Kindle store.
Last updated February 2017.
About the Author
About the Contributors
Table of Contents
-
Introduction
- What is Lean?
- The Typical Goals of Lean
- What Lean Is and Is Not
- Respect and Leadership
- About this Compilation
-
1. Baseball
- 1.1 The Culture of Winning — Baseball and Lean
- 1.2 Standard Work for Baseball Umpires??
- 1.3 Long-Term vs Short-Term in Sports
- 1.4 Safety, Quality (Starts), Delivery (to the Plate), and Coaches
- 1.5 Waste in the New Yankee Stadium Layout?
- 1.6 Washington “Natinals” Error
- 1.7 World Series Defect: Wrong Pitcher
- 1.8 ‘Moneyball’ Lessons – Listen to Your Front-Line Staff
- 1.9 A Lean Guy Watches Moneyball
- 1.10 Guest Post: Talking Lean at the Baseball Winter Meetings
- 1.11 Failure to Follow Process Leads to NL MVP’s Suspension Being Overturned
- 1.12 Robert Andino of the Baltimore Orioles & Dr. W. Edwards Deming
- 1.13 Guest Post: Lacking Baseball Specs Leads to Offensive Explosion (and MLB Scouting Problems)
- 1.14 Stephen Strasburg & the Washington Nationals – Long Term vs. Short Term
- 1.15 Fighting “We’ve Always Done It This Way” in Workplaces & Baseball
- 1.16 Learning Not to Blame: Baseball Edition
- 1.17 Lean Thoughts at a Toronto Blue Jays Game
- 1.18 CUBS Win! Chicago Hospital Implements First Staff-Driven Improvement in 108 Years
-
2. Football
- 2.1 Lack of Clear Visual Controls and Training in the NFL
- 2.2 NFL Kaizen
- 2.3 Lessons from Northwestern Football
- 2.4 How Much of Football is VA?
- 2.5 Learning from Super Bowl Coaches
- 2.6 The Cost of Unsold Uniform Inventory
- 2.7 The Patriots are like Toyota?
- 2.8 Sunday Night Muda
- 2.9 The Sun Devil Suggestion System
- 2.10 “Not Conducive to Suggestions”
- 2.11 American-Made Footballs in the Super Bowl
- 2.12 Reducing the Waste of Waiting in the NFL Draft
- 2.13 A Funny Example of Not Delivering “Value”?
- 2.14 Another Uniform Inventory Story
- 2.15 Taking Responsibility for Mistakes – On the Field, and Off
- 2.16 More Proof that Exhortations Don’t Work?
- 2.17 Great Piece on the Failings of Incentives
- 2.18 One Purple Audacious Goal…
- 2.19 Jerry Jones is NOT a Lean Thinker, Apparently?
- 2.20 Only 11 Minutes of Value in an NFL Game?
- 2.21 Safety First – Even at a Northwestern Football Game?
- 2.22 Individual NFL Player Incentives – Why Are They Necessary? Do They Distort the Game?
- 2.23 Super Bowl Footballs – Made in America (Ohio!)
- 2.24 Coach Vince Lombardi on Striving for Perfection
- 2.25 So What If You Don’t Have Stats for Offensive Lineman?
- 2.26 “Like Lean” – NY Jets Coach Rex Ryan
- 2.27 Blame the Stanford Kicker! Blame the Kicker?
- 2.28 Coaching, not Berating, when Mistakes are Made
- 2.29 BCS & College Football Coaches Poll Shenanigans – Bad Voters or Bad System?
- 2.30 Visiting and Teaching at Ohio State – Meeting Archie Griffin, Reflecting on Values and Winning
- 2.31 Alabama Coach Nick Saban - National Champion & Lean Thinker?
- 2.32 Error Proofing an NFL Coach
- 2.33 Rob Gronkowski’s Back Surgery and Post-Op Infections
- 2.34 Denver Bronco Loses Touchdown for Not Following Standardized Work
- 2.35 Parallels Between Philadelphia Eagles’ Coach Chip Kelly & A Lean Leader
- 2.36 Standardized Work? Why Are NFL Concussion Guidelines Not Always Followed?
- 2.37 Process Problem: NFL Super Bowl Coin Toss, A Defect & Rework
- 2.38 Lean is Not About Cutting Costs; 2 Data Point Comparisons in EDs & the NFL
- 2.39 Safety is “always our top priority,” except when it isn’t… in football and hospitals
- 2.40 Lessons from the Football Coaching and Leadership Styles of the Oregon Ducks and Ohio State Buckeyes
- 2.41 The Patriots, Coach Belichick, Aspects of Lean Thinking, and Dr. Deming
- 2.42 Football, Holistic Systems, and Challenging the Way It’s Always Been Done
- 2.43 How Kaizen & Continuous Improvement are Key to Northwestern’s Stellar Defense
- 2.44 Like Lean: An NFL Head Coach Gets Out of His Office, Listens, Learns
- 2.45 Bad Systems & Training, Weak Problem Solving, and Poor Supervision Cause Cancelation of NFL Pre-Season Game?
- 2.46 Patriots’ Coach Bill Belichick : Surface Tablets :: Some Doctors : EMR Systems
- 2.47 Emmitt Smith, An Inadvertent #Lean Coach at AME Dallas?
- 2.48 What the World’s Best Organizations (in Business or Sports) Do…
-
3. Basketball
- 3.1 The NBA Not Involving Its Employees?
- 3.2 NBA Listens to Employees
- 3.3 NBA’s David Stern on Listening
- 3.4 Bad Systems in the News: NBA
- 3.5 “Bad Systems in the News” Update
- 3.6 Lean Elements in NCAA Hoops?
- 3.7 NVA in the NBA — It’s “Value Added”-tastic?
- 3.8 Leadership Thoughts from Late Great Detroit Pistons
- 3.9 Are Slogans Always Bad or Can They Inspire?
- 3.10 NBA Has Learned Its Lesson?
- 3.11 Do Good Coaches Brush Off Feedback from the Team as Whining?
- 3.12 Standardized, but Not Identical – College Basketballs
- 3.13 Gaming the System: Graduation Rates & Pneumonia Rates
- 3.14 Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich, Deming, and Lean Leadership
- 3.15 Spurs Win the NBA Title: Systems, Learning, Teamwork, & Leadership
- 3.16 What We Can Learn About Teamwork and Culture from the San Antonio Spurs
-
4. Hockey
- 4.1 Suboptimizing the New NHL Uniforms?
- 4.2 NHL Backing Off like the NBA Did?
- 4.3 How the Gold Medal Puck Was Almost Lost
- 4.4 No Joke: Lean Methods Applied by a Hockey Coach in Ontario
- 4.5 Learning to See (and Spell) in the NHL
- 4.6 Would the WSJ Blame “Just in Time” for the Stanley Cup Being Late?
-
5. Miscellaneous Sports
- 5.1 Quick Changeover for American Airlines Center
- 5.2 Not following the “Standard” lets an athlete off the hook?
- 5.3 Changing Glass vs. Pouring a Glass
- 5.4 I’d Like to “5S” the Wimbledon TV Broadcast Screen
- 5.5 Matthew May’s Encounter with Tiger & Goals of Perfection
- 5.6 Guest Post: Finding Waste at the Stadium
-
Mark Graban
- Mark Graban’s LeanPub Books:
- Mark Graban’s Traditionally Published Books:
Authors have earned$10,343,559writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
The Leanpub 45-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 45 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers), EPUB (for phones and tablets) and MOBI (for Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
- #1
Continuous Delivery Pipelines
Dave FarleyThis practical handbook provides a step-by-step guide for you to get the best continuous delivery pipeline for your software.
- #2
Top 20 Digital Health Trends For The Near Future
Dr. Bertalan MeskoDigital technology could help transform unsustainable healthcare systems, provide cheaper, faster, and more effective solutions for diseases – and could lead to healthier individuals living in healthier communities.
In this book, we analyze the top 20 trends shaping the future of healthcare, and what they all look like in practice.
- #3
Introducing EventStorming
Alberto BrandoliniThe deepest tutorial and explanation about EventStorming, straight from the inventor.
- #4
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
- #5
Atomic Kotlin
Bruce Eckel and Svetlana IsakovaFor both beginning and experienced programmers! From the author of the multi-award-winning Thinking in C++ and Thinking in Java together with a member of the Kotlin language team comes a book that breaks the concepts into small, easy-to-digest "atoms," along with exercises supported by hints and solutions directly inside IntelliJ IDEA!
- #6
Practical FP in Scala: A hands-on approach
Gabriel VolpeA practical book aimed for those familiar with functional programming in Scala who are yet not confident about architecting an application from scratch.
Together, we will develop a purely functional application using the best libraries in the Cats ecosystem, while learning about design patterns and best practices.
- #7
Modern Typescript
Ben Beattie-HoodCovering from basic building of interfaces to advanced use of unions, partials, intersections, and mapped types. Join me for this deep-dive from fundamentals to advanced aspects of Typescript, and how you can leverage its static testing system to accelerate your development velocity.
- #8
The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book
Andriy BurkovEverything you really need to know in Machine Learning in a hundred pages.
- #9
R Programming for Data Science
Roger D. PengThis book brings the fundamentals of R programming to you, using the same material developed as part of the industry-leading Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization. The skills taught in this book will lay the foundation for you to begin your journey learning data science. Printed copies of this book are available through Lulu.
- #10
OpenIntro Statistics
David Diez, Christopher Barr, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and OpenIntroA complete foundation for Statistics, also serving as a foundation for Data Science.
Leanpub revenue supports OpenIntro (US-based nonprofit) so we can provide free desk copies to teachers interested in using OpenIntro Statistics in the classroom and expand the project to support free textbooks in other subjects.
More resources: openintro.org.
Top Bundles
- #1
Software Architecture for Developers: Volumes 1 & 2 - Technical leadership and communication
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #2
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #5
9 Books-Bundle: Shut Up and Code!
9 Books
"Shut up and code." Laughter in the audience. The hacker had just plugged in his notebook and started sharing his screen to present his super-smart Python script. "Shut up and code" The letters written in a white literal coding font on black background was the hackers' home screen background mantra. At the time, I was a first-year computer... - #6
The Python Craftsman
3 Books
The Python Craftsman series comprises The Python Apprentice, The Python Journeyman, and The Python Master. The first book is primarily suitable for for programmers with some experience of programming in another language. If you don't have any experience with programming this book may be a bit daunting. You'll be learning not just a programming...
