Scott Sedam

BIO — Scott Sedam, president of TrueNorth Development (www.truen.com), spends most of his time working in the trenches with builders, suppliers and trade contractors. His Lean Builder blog appears weekly at HousingZone.com. He welcomes your feedback at scott@truen.com.

Lean Building Blog: What Lean isn’t

Posted: Tue, 2012-05-01 07:56

By: Scott Sedam

During an orientation recently with a room full of suppliers and trades for one of our “LeanPlan Workout” implementations, I was interrupted by a woman who clearly did not appreciate my message. Despite my saying it 6 different ways and...

Lean Building Blog: Some of my best friends are architects and engineers — really!

Posted: Fri, 2012-04-27 06:43

By: Scott Sedam

They say a writer never “makes it” until he gets hate mail. In at least four blog posts this year, I have expressed my frustrations with architects and engineers in this country and those posts have invited a few terse replies, one of which...

Lean Building Blog: What to read on Lean

Posted: Tue, 2012-04-10 10:32

By: Scott Sedam

Today, a sharp young guy named Ryan wrote to me after seeing a Keynote Presentation I did at the recent BuilderExchange meeting in Las Vegas. Two-hundred fifty people attended from 60 suppliers and a like number of builders.

I basically...

Lean Building Blog: Who has the edge on innovation?

Posted: Wed, 2012-04-04 11:53

By: Scott Sedam

Last fall the president of one of America’s “Top 10” builders who I have known for years corralled me at a conference. Because I travel this industry about as much as anyone, he likes to pump me for intelligence – as I do him. He wondered, what...

Lean Building Blog: Should the National Housing Quality Award survive?

Posted: Tue, 2012-03-27 12:59

By: Scott Sedam

The NAHB in conjunction with Professional Builder Magazine launched the National Housing Quality Award (NHQA) in 1993 to encourage and recognize best practices and best builders in the continual improvement of product and process. Modeled after...

Lean Building Blog: There is no future in pessimism

Posted: Wed, 2012-02-29 11:43

By: Scott Sedam

Our business picked up in late 2011, started the New Year off well, and we were deluged at the IBS show, beginning with a standing-room-only presentation on Lean Design. Our first quarter is strong and 2nd quarter looks even better. Builders seem...

Lean Builder Blog: IBS and The Learning Organizations

Posted: Tue, 2012-02-21 17:29

By: Scott Sedam

Peter Senge wrote one of the best business books of the 1990’s, The Learning Organization. It is one of those on my list to pull off the shelf and read again, if I ever catch up with the stack of unread volumes on my credenza now. I even attended...

The Lean Building Blog: Buying by the square foot — an anti-Lean practice

Posted: Thu, 2012-02-02 17:35

By: Scott Sedam

There is nothing in homebuilding that makes less sense than purchasing by the square foot and it is a big obstacle in Lean implementation. Other than the fact that it makes things easy I suppose, there is very little to be said for it. It damn...

The Lean Builder: Fixing Architecture I

Posted: Tue, 2012-01-24 15:05

By: Scott Sedam

In my blog two weeks ago, I launched into a tirade about how so many residential architects are not doing their job. Each week, I link this blog back to the LeanBuilding Group on www....

The Lean Builder: Our future – Fairmont or Fusion

Posted: Tue, 2012-01-17 15:41

By: Scott Sedam

With the February edition of Professional Builder, I begin a series on the evolution of quality management. Here is a more detailed version of an excerpt from that article to come. Be sure to read that.

Can a company really go from worst...