Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: November 6, 2026
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News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better.
The common thread this edition: tools don't improve anything on their own, whether it's AI or a checklist. Ryan shares pieces on mapping workflows before automating them, what the history of Lean teaches about AI adoption, and why hospitals that copied Pronovost's checklist without the leadership behind it missed the point. Also included: a former Toyota chief engineer's 17 principles, the hidden cost of flattening org charts, and how leaders escape the hero trap.
Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation
For real performance gains with AI, start by mapping your workflows
Sigh. It's 2026, and we still need to remind folks to develop a basic understanding of the work before implementing a solution. Not surprisingly, most companies have adopted AI, but far fewer have turned it into real performance gains.
This HBR piece argues the fix is to map each workflow end to end, find the constraints, and redesign around them rather than automating individual tasks. In a study of 515 companies, those that saw examples of how others redesigned work around AI identified 44% more use cases and generated nearly twice as much revenue.
If you want improvement, get back to basic principles: go see, seek to understand, and show respect.
What the history of Lean can teach us about AI adoption
Where will the thinking occur?
Art Smalley looks back at how organizations struggled to absorb scientific management and the Toyota Production System and sees the same pattern playing out with AI. His warning: “just giving people access to a chat interface does not create an enterprise AI capability.” Instead, he argues for letting the people who do the work analyze and improve it, and cautions that AI applied carelessly can simply automate waste.
Stop chasing raccoons
Disclaimer: I hate raccoons. They creep me out with their beady eyes and little hands. So what do you do when one sneaks into your barn through a broken window? Of course, you take a picture and put it into ChatGPT! Ron Pereira reminds us not to chase raccoons and instead get to the root of the problem.
Creating a Culture of Improvement
The secret ingredient to checklist adoption? Love (and Lean).
The two things that met the most resistance when I worked in hospitals were a commitment to zero harm for known preventable conditions and the adoption of checklists. How could clinicians, who provide care and in many cases take oaths to do no harm, reject such evident help? Because they're people.
Dr. Peter Pronovost is best known for the ICU checklist that helped cut central line infections in Michigan hospitals, but he argues hospitals copied the visible tool and skipped the leadership behaviors and management systems that made it work. Mark Graban reviews Pronovost's essay on University Hospitals, which reports large drops in surgical complications and sepsis mortality, and runs process behavior charts on some of the headline numbers, finding the reported 80% drop in sentinel events closer to 40-45%.
Toyota Veteran Naoto Kitagawa's 17 Principles for Chief Engineers
What does it take to be a chief engineer at Toyota, according to a former chief engineer at Toyota? Surprisingly little about engineering.
Naoto Kitagawa, who led programs including the Camry and Avalon, distills the role into 17 principles grounded in curiosity, empathy, and imagination. Several apply well beyond product development, like going to the source to see conditions for yourself and observing customers whenever you're unsure what they need. John Shook and Jim Morgan add reflections on leading through influence rather than formal authority.
Flattening looks like efficiency on the org chart, but who loses sponsors?
Will AI help organizations flatten their structures? In 2024, Gartner predicted one in five organizations would use AI to do just that by 2026.
Flattening is often sold as efficiency, but this piece from The Global Leadership Signal argues it quietly removes the managers who advocate for people outside the room where decisions are made. Gallup data cited in the piece shows the average manager's number of direct reports rising from 8.2 in 2013 to 12.1 in 2025. The author recommends measuring sponsorship before restructuring and assigning named advocacy responsibilities to senior leaders.
Coaching – Developing Self & Others
Escaping the hero trap
Leaders often get to where they are because of their heroic efforts. But what happens when they become the bottleneck? Bill Flynn, author of The Hero Trap: The Leader's Shift from Doing to Designing, joins Dave Stachowiak on Coaching for Leaders episode 806 to share how leaders can shift their identity to be successful at the next level.
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