Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is by Brian Buck, a fellow lean healthcare practitioner who regularly blogs at “Improve With Me.” Following my tendency to share the silly and the funny on Saturdays, Brian delivers some laughs and insights below.…
Former Wiremold CEO Art Byrne explains why Lean must be led directly by the CEO and treated as a core business strategy–not a set of tools. Drawing on his experience at GE, Danaher, and The Wiremold Company, Byrne shares how…
Mark’s note: Today kicks off my vacation and a stretch of guest posts that will run in this spot through October 12 (with the exception of a new podcast with Art Byrne that will appear later today or tomorrow). After…
Yesterday was an outstanding day at the Northeast Shingo Prize Conference in Worcester, Massachusetts – my first time attending and speaking at this event. It’s always great to see Bruce Hamilton (of “Toast Kaizen” fame) and the rest of the…
TL;DR: Headlines and two-point comparisons can’t prove a “sick out.” This post shows how Process Behavior Charts (PBCs) help distinguish real signals from normal variation–and why data alone can’t confirm intent or blame. As a frequent flyer on American Airlines…
The list of stuff I’ve read and wanted to blog about has grown… that inventory becomes this post. Here are links to some varied articles I’ve read recently that might be of interest on a number of Lean related topics,…
Thanks go to Hakan Forss, from Sweden, who sent me a link to an article he wrote about Lean, waste, and patient flow. He compares two healthcare systems–one that focuses on keeping silo-ed resources busy (which leads to long patient…
Thanks to ExecutiveInsight for publishing my article: “Instituting a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Kaizen encourages low-impact improvements that can have a big payoff for healthcare providers.” The principles of kaizen are not that complicated. But, organizations do require discipline and…
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with the help of Michael George, tried injecting talk of so-called “Lean Six Sigma” into the 2012 presidential race, but I think it was received as a bit of a novelty topic that illustrated the…
Recently, the Wall Street Journal put some focus on the issue of so-called “door to balloon” times in our hospitals. “Door to balloon” is a measure of time from a patient with a serious type of heart attack (“STEMI“) arriving…
When I kicked off the “Lean Memes” contest last month, I had no idea what I was starting… I figured I’d get a handful of entries. Well, I got well over 100 from a number of people, including 5 or…
As the creator of the admittedly awkward L.A.M.E. acronym (meaning Lean As Mistakenly Explained or Lean As Misguidedly Executed), one burden is that I often get emails tipping me off to L.A.M.E. sightings. In a nutshell, it’s L.A.M.E. when a…
