All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
My guest for Episode #362 is Adam Lawrence, managing partner with Process Improvement Partners LLC. He’s an industrial engineer who had a long career working with TQM, Six Sigma, and Lean at Thomasvile Furniture and other Armstrong World Industries companies.…
I wrote a blog post for KaiNexus that’s the first in a series that we’re going to run about “Opportunities for Improvement” in everyday situations like golfing, walking for exercise, getting take-out food… or my post about going to the…
It’s great to see examples of manufacturing companies being flexible and adaptive in these challenging times. Lean methods are often providing a huge boost in what can be life-saving efforts. Lean often gets mislabeled as a “low inventory” system (or…
Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… Dear Readers, Covid-19 has disrupted the world. We have been thrust into a situation where we are required to rapidly adapt and innovate, and the stakes have never been higher. Lean principles of continuous improvement…
The first 14 episodes of “Lean Whiskey” have been traditional audio podcasts. Jamie Flinchbaugh and I record them through Zoom and we usually use the video call option even though we have just published audio. For our next episode, we’re…
TL;DR: When staff invent workarounds to cope with shortages or failures, the real problem isn’t their behavior–it’s the system leaders allowed to fail. This blog post is a collaboration with a Lean healthcare consulting friend of mine, who heard another…
Recently, I hosted this… COVID-19 Quiz Time: Test Your Knowledge and Learn Even More March 24 from 1:00 – 2:00 ET Previously, we’ve hosted “Ask Us Anything” sessions where people submitted questions to doctors about coronavirus and COVID-19. In this…
TL;DR: In a crisis, what leaders do matters more than what they say–and inconsistency at the top quietly undermines trust, safety, and compliance. I believe that leaders need to lead by example. This was true in my “Lean manufacturing” days…
Being in work from home mode, I alternate from thinking and writing about the current crisis and trying to figure out how to be helpful to people remotely. One idea is that I’d like to facilitate an online book study…
Episode #361 of the podcast is admittedly not about Lean, but it’s an important topic that I think needs to be shared in these times. I’m sharing audio that came from a KaiNexus webinar yesterday that we called “Ask Docs…
I had a phone conversation yesterday with an emergency medicine physician after her shift at an unnamed hospital in an undisclosed state. She had a number of frustrations to share and she doesn’t really have an outlet (and doesn’t want…
Today, I’m sharing a preview (in podcast and transcript form) of a webinar that Steve Kane, from Gemba Academy, will presenting on April 8th as part of the KaiNexus webinar series. Coaching Strategies for Leaders It’s free and I hope…
