Mark Graban

As I blogged about yesterday, things went well at the Oscars... or, at least, no errors were made in the announcements. But that thing that didn't go well was the TV ratings. Two Data Points Are Not a Trend The headlines I saw had a lot of two-data-point comparisons. Headlines sometimes gave the percentage decrease in viewers or how many million fewer viewers there were. Many talked about "record low" but if you're tracking a metric "record low" or "all-time high" doesn't mean there's a "special cause." That "record low" could still be noise in the system.

Tomorrow, my post will be about headlines that scream about ratings for The Oscars being "down from last year" or "the lowest in X years." As I've blogged about before, I'm always skeptical of such simplistic comparisons that might mask the real underlying trend. But first, could the Academy avoid last year's embarrassing mixup?

Here's an interesting Bloomberg article about Toyota never being satisfied, which includes improving the way they improve: "Toyota's Way Changed the World's Factories. Now the Retool" Did you know that Toyota has a central TPS group??

I did manage to buy a book that was published by NUMMI to celebrate their 10th anniversary. "10 Years of Quality & Teamwork" is the title. Here is the cover and I'll share a few things that caught my attention inside. It's interesting to think through this book in the context of : Tesla (the current owners of the building - see my past blog post) Healthcare organizations

Konnichiwa from Japan! I am having a great time with my friends from Kaizen Institute and our tour attendees. I wrote a post on Monday, but I never expect to be able to write much while here because it's very busy and I also want to reflect a bit before writing. In this post, I share two articles I wrote recently and some other tidbits...

It's Monday morning in Nagoya, Japan as I write this. I'm still jet-lagged and up early, so here's a blog post after all... Sunday, I had the chance to visit the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology in Nagoya. There's so much that I can blog about...I'll write more posts about my museum visit in the future. In this post though, I share a little bit about some of the books that they sell - in English and Japanese...

Last week, I saw a headline about a drop in NCAA college football attendance. I wasn't satisfied with the two data point comparisons or other written descriptions of the metrics. I wanted to see data. SHOW ME THE DATA, JERRY! (with apologies to "Jerry Maguire"). I wanted to see a chart. So, I found the data on to NCAA website and created "process behavior charts" that tell you much more about the data than text numbers ever could.

This podcast is sponsored by Cardinal Health. Joining me again for episode #301 of the podcast is Joe Swartz, my friend and co-author for our books Healthcare Kaizen and The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen:. You can learn more about our books here. He also contributed a chapter to the book Practicing Lean. (read an excerpt). Today, we're talking about "Champions of Change," as I've been writing about for Cardinal Health.

There's a lot to admire about Elon Musk. I admire his risk taking and his entrepreneurial spirit. I use PayPal a lot (one of his early companies) and I admire the innovation of Tesla and SpaceX. But, I question how much Musk and Tesla have been willing to learn from Toyota or people like Paul O'Neill.

Today's post is my eighth cartoon collaboration with a skilled artist and medical assistant, Carrie Schurman (see past cartoons).  You can find her on Twitter as @carrieschurman.

I'm happy to be playing the role of host and moderator next Monday for a webinar that will be presented by Harry Kenworthy titled: How a Lean Adoption Strategy for Public Schools Applies to Everyone The webinar is presented by KaiNexus. I think it's a webinar that, like the last one he did for us, will have lessons for people from any industry or setting.

My guests for Episode #300 of the podcast are Tracey and Ernie Richardson, authors of the excellent book titled: The Toyota Engagement Equation: How to Understand and Implement Continuous Improvement Thinking in Any Organization