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

How Standard Should Standard Improvement Boards Be?

Guest Post by Joe Swartz: At Franciscan Health, we were struggling to create a system-wide standard for our improvement boards. Although we had deployed them to over 50 departments across our 14 hospitals, it has been a struggle to agree on what the boards should look like. Five of our hospitals used rows for each key metric while nine of our hospitals used columns for each key metric. However, now our leadership was asking us to become more standardized across our system.

Art Smalley on Toyota Problem Solving: Four Types of Problems Explained

My guest for Episode #324 of the podcast is Art Smalley. Art was one of the first Americans to work for Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan and, since then, has been helping other organizations with the Toyota Production System (a.k.a. "Lean") methods and approaches. You can also visit his website to learn more, www.ArtOfLean.com.

Art is a fellow faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute. He has written two Shingo Publication Award-winning books: Creating Level Pull and (co-authored with Durward Sobek) Understanding A3 Thinking. Art later wrote Toyota's Kaizen Methods: Six Steps to Improvement with Isao Kato.

I own all of these books and have only met Art briefly in the past, so I'm happy to finally have him here as a guest. Today, we'll talk about Art's career and his most recent book, Four Types of Problems, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute (note: LEI provided me a free electronic copy of the book).

Lean Startup Webcast: How to Turn Metrics Into the Right Kind of Action with Process Behavior Charts

Eric Ries and Lean Startup Co. have been really helpful friends in spreading the message about "Process Behavior Charts" in their community. They invited me to give a talk at last year's Lean Startup Week and Eric was kind enough to endorse my book Measures of Success (paperback coming soon - get notified or pre-order)...

Recently, they invited me to be a guest for their webcast series, where Marilyn Gorman asked me questions about my book and the Process Behavior Chart methodology. It was a challenge to talk about this visual method without slides and charts, so I did my best to create air charts with finger gestures :-)

[Video] Are Your Leaders “Addicted to the Status Quo?”

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know that the practice of "Motivational Interviewing" has been a big interest of mine for a few years. Although this method comes from the clinical practice of addiction counseling, there are many applications in the workplace.

This week on the Lean Enterprise Institute's "The Lean Post" site, former Toyota leader Ron Oslin is asked about Motivational Interviewing and how leaders might be "addicted to the status quo" (a phrase Ron has trademarked). 

Videos by Skip Steward That Explain Routine Variation and Rules for Finding “Signals”

You might remember the podcasts that I did with my friend Skip Steward, the Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care in Tennessee (links below).

Skip recently created some excellent videos that explain the basics of "Process Behavior Charts," a method that I explore in my book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More.

See those videos below the podcast links.

Operational Excellence Mixtape: November 9, 2018

Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients The benefits of Electronic healthcare records are a polarizing topic with healthcare providers.  Standardization and electronic workflows have their upsides, but many are developed to optimize billing and payments, and are not designed with…

A New Book by a Friend: Lean Veterinary Practice Management

So what's the new book and cover pictured here? This is the book being finished by my friend Chip Ponsford, III, DVM. Yes, DVM stands for Doctor of Veterinary Medicine.

"Lean Veterinary Practice Management: Higher Quality, Less Waste, Greater Staff Engagement and Continuous Improvement."

Podcast #323 – Davis Balestracci on “Data Sanity”

I first met Davis Balestracci at a conference a few years back, where I heard him give a very spirited and insightful presentation. That's why I'm happy to have him as my guest for Episode #323 of the podcast.

We'll talk about a range of topics, including some of the key lessons that you'll find in his book (as a much deeper dive than we can get into here) Data Sanity: A Quantum Leap to Unprecedented Results (2nd edition). Davis has been a long-time columnist for Quality Digest, and you'll hear his thoughts on Process Behavior Charts, W. Edwards Deming, Lean Six Sigma, and more.

“Movember” Fundraising – Why I Shaved For the First Time in 15 Years

Today is the start of the annual "Movember" fundraising movement where men grow mustaches to raise money and awareness for men's health issues, including prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health. I don't mean to ignore women's health issues or other cancer fundraising efforts, but this is what I'm participating in right now... so I thought I'd share.

Yeah, there's a photo...

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