Last week, I had a chance to see one of the “Deming Library” videos (on loan to me by Claire Crawford-Mason). BTW, I’ll be interviewing Claire soon about her reflections on working closely with W. Edwards Deming for the production…
I first blogged about the possibility in March – doing a weeklong study trip to Japan with Lean Healthcare professionals, in partnership with Kaizen Institute. The dates are set for November 11 to 17 and we have people signed up…
This is all somewhat preliminary, but I’ve been talking to the folks at the Kaizen Institute about helping organize a study trip to Japan, aimed at Lean Healthcare professionals. The trip might take place in the second half of 2012…
TL;DR: Salem Health leaders and frontline staff visited Japan to study Lean and Kaizen–and returned with a deeper understanding that transformation comes from respect for people, teamwork across titles, and leaders going to the front lines to learn. The trip…
Today, I’m linking to a post from a new blog written by the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business (“Think Op-Ex“). The post “What’s in a name?” features thoughts from James Hereford, formerly of Group Health (part of the…
TL;DR — GM vs. Toyota After the Japan Earthquake General Motors (GM) Toyota Bottom line:This wasn’t a failure of JIT or Lean. It was a leadership choice. Toyota showed that real Lean is about how you treat people when work…
Our thoughts and prayers are with our friends in Japan and everybody there dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake and whatever problems are yet to come. This article from Forbes gives some suggestions on how to donate and how…
Toyota Posts Big Loss, Signals More to Come – WSJ.com I saw this article on Saturday and it reminded me to go ahead and blog about a few other articles I’ve seen about Japanese CEOs lately. The big news about…
In Japan, more CEOs share the pain of tough times – USATODAY.com The USA Today, whether they’re trying or not, is doing a good job recently of highlighting issues at least somewhat related to Toyota and the Deming philosophy. While…
Norman Bodek is once again back for episode #61 of the LeanBlog Podcast, talking about his discovery of a unique system in Japan, at Canon, called the “Super Meister” system that trains employees to be able to build an entire…
I’d love to go on one of these Japan lean study missions at some point. Blogger Jason Yip, who writes about Lean software development and comments here sometimes, wrote about the trip he took with Enna. Japan Lean Study Mission…
Blog reader Kevin wrote with this excellent question (used with his permission): My question is about the idea I see many using in the lean blogosphere…and that being the continued and rampant use of Japanese terms when dealing with lean.…