All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Be honest, would you have seen the intentional typo in the post title if I hadn’t put it on quotation marks? It’s still not easy to see, is it? Proofreading is difficult and it’s impossible for even the skilled, dedicated…
TL;DR: Dr. Gary Kaplan describes Virginia Mason’s adoption of Lean as a “war on waste,” but the real impact goes beyond waste reduction. By applying the Toyota Production System as a management system–not just a set of tools–Virginia Mason improved…
I’ve dropped the Kindle price of my book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More to $2.99 as a way to spur sales and to get the book in front of more people. I shared a bit about…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients A group of Winnipeg physicians is opening a clinic designed to treat non-emergent patients in an effort to reduce Emergency Room overcrowding. Tom Brodbeck of the Winnipeg Sun is skeptical that it addresses any underlying causes…
I haven’t read it, but Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has been a pop-culture phenomenon in the past few years. I’ve seen some compare her process to the Lean…
I’ve met Jarvis Gray a few times at the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement conference (I still call it the “Society for Health Systems Conference”). SHS is a great organization to be a part of, by the way. Jarvis recently launched…
Please join us on May 16, as KaiNexus and I host a webinar presented by a leader from one of our customers — Chad Westbrook from AGCO Corporation. Chad is a manufacturing engineering manager and AGCO Production System manager there.…
I got onto the elevator in the lobby of our condo building one day last week. Our building’s maintenance guy was already on there with a rolling cart of tools and supplies. I asked him to let me hop on…
tl;dr summary: Fake Lean Six Sigma books were already crowding Amazon before generative AI made them cheaper to produce and harder to spot. The tell that still works is whether a real, findable author stands behind the book. Usually, my…
TL;DR: Lean is about designing systems that make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. When software like Excel allows irreversible mistakes with a single misclick–and no meaningful confirmation or undo–it violates basic…
Here’s an interesting column from Becker’s Hospital Review, written by Michael Dowling, President and CEO, Northwell Health. I’m guessing he created the headline, since the phrase “give a damn” doesn’t appear in the article: Michael Dowling: CEOs — Give a…
TL;DR: When leaders prioritize speed and output over quality, employees stop speaking up–and safety suffers. From GM to Boeing to hospitals, production pressure creates fear, hidden defects, and misleading public narratives that no amount of PR can fix. Yesterday’s blog…
