Lean Management Journal – “Servants to the Cause” by Joseph Paris


In 1996, my first assignment to South Africa for XONITEK was being hired by Macola-South Africa to train their personnel – and the personnel of their resellers – on how to implement Macola’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. It was a very turbulent time in South Africa; apartheid had just ended, there was a new…

In this episode of State of Readiness, we interview Carl Kirpes, responsible for Crude Oil Strategy & Analysis at Marathon Petroleum Corporation. Carl and I met some years ago at an annual conference of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers when he was just graduating from Iowa State University – and we have stayed in…

“Changing a Continuous Improvement Initiative into a Global Program”; LMJ Board Member and XONITEK’s Chairman, Joseph Paris, discusses the tribal nature of people and how it hinders the scaling of lean in business. Published in Lean Management Journal in the July 2014 issue. Download PDF

Several years ago, I discovered that one of the technology partners of my firm had a nickname for me – it is “CJ”. For the life of me, I could not figure-out how they came-up with that as a nickname. I mean, my brother’s name is Christopher John – so that would actually make some sense. But he…

It seems that at every Conference, Symposium, or other gathering of higher-learning and thought-leaders – where the topic is Lean Six-Sigma – many of the attendees, and almost all of the speakers, glorify and hold with the highest veneration the supposedly unmatched performance and prowess of Japanese companies and their management. Enshrined as proof-positive in…

I am going to call 2008 “The Year of Quicksand”. 2008 started-out relatively strong and at-ease – but this proved deceptive as the observable global heath was hiding the real rot underneath. All it took was one miss-step, and the struggle began. And it seemed that the more we struggled, the deeper we sank –…
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