All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
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…
Ever since I started podcasting in 2006, I’ve been using a company called “Hipcast” to be the “hosting” company for the podcast audio files and feeds. For those of you not familiar with podcasting, that’s the website where I upload…
Ryan and I are co-sponsoring a workshop that I’ll be presenting on “Measures of Success” in Winnipeg on May 10. Learn more. Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients In Canada, we wait. A long time. Especially if you are referred…
Mark’s note: This post is reprinted from an email from Laura Batz Townsend, the CEO of the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation. I asked to share it here, on the tenth anniversary of Louise Batz’s tragic death that was…
I’ve owned the domain names LeanWhiskey.com and LeanWhisky.com for two years or so. That’s not because I was going to get into the whiskey business like former Toyota guy David Meier. I like Lean. I like Whiskey. I’ll figure out…
Back in 2006, I wrote my first blog post about the unfortunate use of “assembly line” to mean “bad quality.” The context there was healthcare people complaining about Lean as being a pathway to “assembly line medicine.” Not all assembly…
tl;dr: A senior Toyota leader explains why the Toyota Production System is widely misunderstood. TPS is not just a set of tools, not just “lean production,” and not primarily about cutting costs. As Nampachi Hayashi explains, TPS is a total…
