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Thanks for the video links. These five segments will make great teaching tools, in my opinion. While they may seem superficial to someone intimate with the challenges of a lean deployment, especially in healthcare, they present great material to inspire and provoke!

Toussaint's relaxed mastery of the basics (improvement in quality and delivery go hand-in-hand with cost reduction through elimination of waste) combined with his intimacy with how his system works right down to the front line should challenge every CEO.

And he even brought up my pet peeve – what we call healthcare is usually rework – when he said (paraphrasing) "We should be paid for improving a community's health, not for doing more procedures". Brilliant! The piecework pay for most medical practice REWARDS REWORK (fixing sick people) rather than fostering health. Not that we should not help the sick! Just that the model is upside down and the incentives are backwards.

Keep up the good blog!

-ALB

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Why has lean thinking not spread 100% even in the auto industry? You have GM "doing lean" in the factories, but the execs still haven't come close to transforming the way they lead. Their head sales & marketing uses the word "lean" to mean they don't have enough cars on the lot to meet demand. They are "too lean" he says.

But I digress.

I think it was Shook or Womack or said lean leadership isn't that hard to understand, it's just VERY different.

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Which is exactly the debate we've heard from every industry where a few pioneers do the work John has done and then wonder – why don't more people do it?

The deeper question for all of us in the lean community, I believe, is why don't we have more John Toussaints. Certainly, the key to have large organizations such as Thedacare succeed in this way, is the leadership of the senior executive. In healthcare, this means the willingness to measure, map and reveal problems in order to solve them. This does take courage – and persistence.

The interview is fascinating both for John's mastery of his topic, but also for the interests of the interviewer – who reacted like every other new person introduced to lean: huh? Can we get back to real life?

This is a great interview. It also reflects every interview of every lean leader i've come across: it's hard work but it's worth it, if we can do it every one can. The puzzle here, industry after industry, is why so few CEOs catch that bug? Is it in the way we teach it? Is it against top management nature? is it wrong for the incentive game? Indeed, one of the greatest moments of the interview was when the reporter kept trying to get john to commit "FOR" or "Against", and John stuck to his guns: we need to understand the real problem. Beautiful!

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