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All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.

Podcast #326 – Katie Anderson on Lean Collaboration Within Healthcare and Beyond

Joining me for the fourth time, here for Episode #326 of the podcast, is my friend and colleague Katie Anderson, a leadership coach, Lean consultant, speaker and writer from the San Francisco area. Hear our previous podcasts about visiting and living in Japan.

Today, we're talking about a number of topics related to learning and collaboration: Her upcoming book with Isao Yoshino, the local San Francisco Bay area AME consortium that she is leading, her next trip to Japan (which you can join), and more.

I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as we did.

Operational Excellence Mixtape: December 7, 2018

Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Healthcare is the world’s largest cottage industry, as evidenced by the enormous variation in practice.  Healthcare practitioners may finally be ready to acknowledge that reducing variation is important to improving patient safety and outcomes according…

My Planned Workshop with Jeff Hunter on Strategy and Metrics

Jeff Hunter and I have taught related workshops before, him on the first day (teaching about strategy and Lean), and me on the second (teaching about Measures of Success).

We are working to deliver our first COMBINED workshop that integrates topics of strategy and metrics. We're thinking of doing this in Orlando in March 2019. Please see this page for more information, to sign up to be notified when registration opens, and to give input on what dates would work best for you.

Throwback Thursday: This is Not a Drill — It Happened Again

I really don't enjoy the type of "Throwback Thursday" posts that are triggered by something in the news that reminds me of something that I've blogged about in the past.

Sometimes, it seems people are doomed to keep repeating the same preventable errors instead of learning from others, improving systems, and mistake proofing things in life. In this post, we look back at repeated errors in pathology, building demolition, and emergency alert systems...

GM Shrinking, Laying Off People, Shutting Down Factories, and Cutting Costs Isn’t “Lean and Agile”

I take no joy in the troubles of any automaker, be it Tesla, Nissan, GM or any others over time.

Of course, Nissan and GM have been in the news most recently, with the firing (and jailing) of Nissan and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn. And now, GM has announced major layoffs, the cancelation of some passenger car programs, and the shutdown (and possible closure) of five plants in North America.

I was talking to a friend the other day and I predicted that we'd see news headlines about something like "GM to get Leaner." These headlines would be using the word "lean" to mean "get smaller" instead of referring to "Lean" (which I capitalize as a proper noun) as a synonym for the Toyota Production System.

I was disappointed to hear GM's CEO, Mary Barra, a long-time GM employee using the word "lean" in the context of the company getting smaller.

Operational Excellence Mixtape: November 23, 2018

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Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Hospitals have been collecting patient complaint data for decades, but leveraging the data for improvement has remained elusive.  Some new publications show how using a big data approach for patient complaint data can help identify…

How a Community Hospital Built a Culture of Continuous Improvement

I'm happy to be hosting, via KaiNexus, another free webinar. Click the link below to register:

How One Community Hospital is Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement
November 28 from 1:00 - 2:00 pm ET

Presented by Mike McGowan, Director of Process Excellence at Marietta Memorial Hospital

This post also includes thoughts from the KaiNexus community about challenges and barriers to improvement and innovation.