The target printed on the chart was zero percent. The red line had never been near zero. Not in the nine months posted on the wall, and probably not in any month before them. It sat between 6.43% and 6.98%.…
Picture your best week as a leader. Every meeting ran on time. Every status update was green. You walked the floor and people smiled and told you things were going great. Your open-door policy was working beautifully, because employees kept…
Back in 2009, I pointed an early iPhone at my TV and recorded a Fox News segment about ThedaCare’s collaborative care model. The footage is grainy. You can see the glare on the screen and hear the room around me.…
Part of a six-part series on Toyota’s 1992 booklet, The Toyota Production System. See all six posts in order: What Toyota Didn’t Write Down. 102 seconds versus 300 seconds. That’s the comparison the 1992 booklet uses to make the case…
If you’ve read much of my work, you know I keep circling the same question: why do smart, capable people hold back what they know? Sometimes they stay quiet because they tried speaking up once and got burned. Sometimes a…
TL;DR: The NHS backlog gets narrated one month at a time, and millions in bonus money ride on the moves. A Process Behavior Chart shows most movement is noise — and the trusts that stay on top are running structurally…
Gary Peterson spent almost 40 years helping O.C. Tanner build a continuous improvement culture, work that earned the company the Shingo Prize in 1999. He joins me to talk about psychological safety, autonomy, leading change from the middle, and the…
TL;DR: Behavioral nudges can produce real gains in patient experience at almost no cost. They can also be used to dress up a process that should have been fixed. The discipline for CI leaders is knowing the difference and getting…
I have been seeing more AI-generated Lean infographics on LinkedIn lately. So many. It’s annoying. I try not being annoyed, but it’s hard. So, I made one of my own about the trend and posted it on LinkedIn. It collects…
TL;DR: Burger King, T-Mobile, and Domino’s have all built ad campaigns around the same confession: our product was bad, but it’s better now. The marketing is interesting. The leadership lesson is better. In each case, the harsh verdict comes from…
By Mark Graban “I don’t want to hear about those problems again.” A few weeks later, you don’t. Success, right? The defects have disappeared. The safety concerns are gone. Employees have stopped complaining. The daily huddle is faster, the…
You finally found the perfect hire. The one who did this exact job, at a company just like yours, for six years. No training required. You felt the relief of it. Someone who already knows the work, who can start…
