Mark Graban

This post builds off of a little rant I went on over on LinkedIn. I wrote: The Catch-22 of "Lean" training and "implementation"... Executives want big returns and high ROI. That's understandable. But, at the core of Lean, if you're going to call it that, is "#Kaizen," which means allowing everybody to do small improvements even if there isn't big ROI.

Today's post is some material that I wrote for my book Measures of Success but cut due to length. I've modified the material a bit to hopefully be fine as a standalone post. There's a somewhat humorous, if not scary, story from a book (This is Going to Hurt) written by a former "junior doctor" in the British National Health Services (NHS) -- the equivalent of a "resident" in the American medical education system.

Joining me again for Episode 310 is Stephen M. Shortell Ph.D., MPH, MBA. He is Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professorship, HPM and is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.  He was previously a guest on Episode 267 talking about the establishment of the Center for Lean Engagement and Research (CLEAR) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the director.  In this episode, we talk about some initial research that they released in a paper that was published in The Joint Commision Journal on Quality and Patient Safety: "Use of Lean and Related Transformational Performance Improvement Systems in Hospitals in the United States: Results From a National Survey"

My next book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, is in the final editing stages. I previously had just a single page about the book on MarkGraban.com, but I've now created the early version of a more complete website for the book:

It's great to see Lean healthcare featured in one of the world's leading news and business publications. The Economist recently published this article: "Hospitals are learning from industry how to cut medical errors"

Thanks to posting about the trip on LinkedIn, I learned that Mike Bukowski is now working for Sazerac, the parent company of Buffalo Trace, in a process improvement role. Last year, Mike attended the site visit and class that Joe Swartz and I hosted at Franciscan St. Francis Health. Mike has embraced might call "lessons from Toyota," as taught to healthcare people, and is now training and coaching people who make some very fine bourbon, including Aaron Krentz, Processing Supervisor (at right).

Back on the podcast for the sixth time is my friend David Meier, a Lean / TPS consultant who is a former Toyota leader at their plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. As we mentioned in our April episode (#304), he's gotten into what's, perhaps, the most Kentucky of industries... distilling bourbon (and more) at Glenn's Creek Distillery. In this episode, there's a lot of bourbon talk, with some Lean concepts thrown in. If you share our interest in Lean and whiskey, then this might be your most favorite episode ever. Of course, if you don't have any interest in bourbon, you might well skip this one.

I'm excited to share two interesting opportunities to further our learning about Lean. One is a Texas-based event in September and the other is Japan-based, in October.

Here is the recording of the webinar I told you about recently, with themes from my book Measures of Success. What is "management by emoji?"

Here is my latest article that I published on LinkedIn: Is the Reported Drop in Major League Baseball Attendance a "Signal" or "Noise" in the Data?

We have two free webinars coming up in the next week, hosted by KaiNexus. I hope you can join us. Oh, as a reminder, I'm doing a Measures of Success webinar this Friday, the 22nd. The webinars are: The Lowdown on A3 Software [Demo] How to Ease the Pain of Change

Hi -- I'm still not blogging much these days, as I try to focus on finishing my book Measures of Success. You can still buy...