Monthly Archives: November 2017

I saw this recent article from Malaysia: LEAN Healthcare: Reducing patient waiting times, one small step at a time They put Lean in all caps... it's not an acronym. Anyway, back to the article. Their ministry of health is trying to reduce the typical department length of stay number from five hours to something shorter. And Lean is something they're using to help...

My guest for Episode #293 of the podcast is a dynamic speaker and manufacturing leader, Billy R. Taylor. I saw him speak a few years ago at a Shingo Prize Conference and I've wanted to get him on the podcast ever since. He's currently the Director of Commercial, Off Highway, and Support Manufacturing North America for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Over the past 20 years, he has risen from "the lowest level of the organization," up through the manufacturing leadership ranks at Goodyear, including time as a Plant Director at facilities in Oklahoma and North Carolina. He's been "engaged in Lean" for over 15 years and he is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Billy has a BS in in Electrical Engineering from Prairie View A&M University and an MBA from Baker University. Billy was very giving of his time and we talked for over 75 minutes, so I'm breaking this up into two parts, with Part 2 coming soon. Today, we talk about how he got started with Lean, the shift from tools- and event-based Lean to a culture focus, how to build a sense of ownership, servant leadership, employee recognition and more.

Today is a day known as "Giving Tuesday," to follow up the commercially-driven "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" days. It's a great day to give to any cause or organization that's meaningful to you. One organization that I choose to give to throughout the year is the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation. The Batz Foundation produces practical and helpful guidebooks and apps to help protect patients during their hospital stay or other healthcare encounters.

Here is the headline from the Dallas Morning News: "How Toyota improved Parkland Hospital's ER -- with purple lights." I'll give credit to Dr. Fred Cerise, the CEO of Parkland Memorial Hospital, for reaching out to Toyota and TSSC for help...

This is a time of year to give thanks... I have much to be thankful for, so I'm going to start my Thanksgiving break a bit early. Some of you might have noticed that I was battling some technical glitches and gremlins with the site this week. Working with tech support chewed up about an hour each day this week, so I lost time I might have otherwise spent creating content....

As I've been writing about "process behavior charts" - a simple, yet effective method for charting and reacting to (or not overreacting to) metrics, it's made curious what some of the modern Toyota books say about metrics and performance measures.... or at least the first two in The Toyota Way series.

I recently read this article on the IndustryWeek website: Whirlpool's Green Takes Aim at World Class Manufacturing Byron Green, the vice president of manufacturing for Whirlpool's 14 factories in the U.S. and Mexico, said: "...manufacturing was littered with companies that saw lean as a collection of tools that could be deployed for a quick win. Successful companies, he said, instead see it as a bedrock of their culture."....

I bet the company that services my pool was surprised that I had a checklist-related process improvement suggestion for them after a mistake was made instead of being angry and wanting somebody punished or talked to...

In this post, I share links and information about two upcoming free webinars that I'm hosting this month, some 2018 workshops I'm doing again on better managing metrics, next year's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, and some online education about "Healthcare Kaizen" that I have opened up for public registration. Please check out all of the links, resources, and information...

My guests for Episode 292 are the three co-authors of an excellent book, Motivational Interviewing for Leadership: MI-LEAD: Jason Wilcox, Director of Education and Connected Care at VA Roseburg Dr. Brian Kersh, Clinical Psychologist at New Mexico VA Health System Dr. Elizabeth Jenkins, Clinical Psychologist/Courtesy Assistant Professor at University of South Florida

If you watched this year's World Series, you saw a lot of home runs. There were many dramatic home runs in late innings or...

In today's post, I pose a question: Should the major Lean conferences adopt or adapt a practice that's now common at tech events, including Agile and Lean Startup events: a "Code of Conduct" for participants and attendees. Is this a countermeasure to a problem that doesn't exist in the Lean community? Or, is it still good to proactively encourage people to speak up to conference organizers if they are subject to bad behavior during the event? In this post, I get feedback and thoughts from the Lean Enterprise Institute, AME, Catalysis, Lean Frontiers, and the Shingo Institute.