Operational Excellence Mixtape: Aug 2026

Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email.

News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better.

This edition covers what it actually takes for a CEO to “embrace red,” why a $9 billion market for real-time capacity dashboards won't fix hospital flow, and how rewarding firefighting quietly manufactures arsonists. He also makes the case that every AI strategy is really a change management strategy, and that leaning too hard on AI tools can erode the judgment they were supposed to sharpen.

Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation

Embrace the “red”

It's pretty simple: you can't solve problems if you don't acknowledge them. General Electric's Larry Culp keeps showing up in this newsletter for a reason. Mark Graban's latest digs into what “embracing red” actually requires of a CEO, rewarding the accurate bad news over the polished status update, even when it's your own turnaround on the line. Worth a read before your next steering committee meeting.

Larry Culp on Success Theater, Embracing Red, and the GE Turnaround

Your real-time dashboard will not solve hospital flow

Inpatient hospital beds are really expensive. This means every hospital generally seeks to maximize bed utilization. Running your bottleneck at 100% utilization leaves no slack in the system and creates a condition of consistent system gridlock that administrators seek to optimize. And so it goes.

I spent years helping maligned and pressured hospital administrators squeeze any marginal bed capacity through “real time” (or as close as possible) capacity management. The general solution approach of the health system is to buy a system that shows capacity in real-time, in the hopes that this will somehow force flow-optimal decision making. It never worked. Because it wasn't really an operational problem.

Fast forward to today and nothing much has changed. Hospitals are set to spend $9 billion on real-time capacity platforms by 2033, and Dr. Barkoudah's bet is that most of it buys faster chaos, not faster throughput , because the constraint was never operational, it was organizational. Worth reading before your organization buys its way out of a leadership problem.

Every AI strategy is actually a change management strategy

It seems like organizations are deploying AI tools widely, and predictably, some are using the tools to make what they already do more productive. But few are truly using AI to reimagine their ways of working. AI exposes existing organizational weaknesses, and this is not a technical problem to solve.

Creating a Culture of Improvement

Are your “wins” creating arsonists?

A wise man once told me that “rewarding firefighting will eventually create arsonists”. I've sat in enough “crisis” meetings to recognize the pattern Paul Kreis describes here: the same fire gets fought, praised as a win, and quietly reignites a quarter later because nobody owned the permanent fix. His prescription is refreshingly simple: tag every fix as “new” or “repeat” before closing the ticket, and put repeat counts on the leadership dashboard where they can't be ignored.

A non-framework approach to prioritization

You can't do everything at once. Prioritization is critical. But have you ever noticed that we rarely prioritize the work in flight. I mean after all, we had already previously prioritized it, right?

John Cutler's argument that teams should prioritize around their recurring tensions rather than around frameworks stuck with me. His twelve prompts are worth stealing for your next retro, they surface the avoidance patterns that never make it onto a roadmap.

Need to motivate a global workforce? Be human at the top

How do organizations with large global workforces keep people motivated? It's not all about the money. Organizations that focus on enablement over engagement, keep things simple for frontlines, and invest in their middle managers are seeing teams thrive. But above all, leaders need to remain human while building the future of work. Alexia Georghiou's recap of SHRM26 shares the perspectives of four HR executives with one consistent message: people follow leaders who are willing to be visibly human.

Coaching – Developing Self & Others

AI is undermining your judgment

I remember when “business intelligence” was the answer to improving leaders' judgment. Organizations built dashboards and reports with the belief that this will improve leaders' decision-making and make it more data-informed. Did it work? In my experience – meh. It often created a sort of malaise and deference to the report.

It turns out this is an observable pattern when it comes to cognitive offloading and automation. We increasingly defer to the tools, eventually developing a “monoculture” devoid of original judgment or dissent. What do we think? I dunno. What does the dashboard say?

I'm finding the same pattern forming as I rely more on AI. The AI-tools that are meant to sharpen judgment could easily replace it. Here's how to maintain original judgment in the AI era.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rjmccormack/

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