All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
TL;DR: Captain “Sully” Sullenberger’s leadership lessons from Flight 1549 highlight that safety depends on humility, trust, teamwork, and learning from mistakes–not heroics or checklists alone. High-risk industries like aviation improve safety by focusing on systems, psychological safety, and fact-based decisions.…
Mark's Note: Today's post is by Kay Kendall, CEO & Principal of BaldrigeCoach. You might remember her from episode #277 of my podcast. She's the co-author of Leading the Malcolm Baldrige Way: How World-Class Leaders Align Their Organizations to Deliver Exceptional Results. Kay sent this out recently via her email newsletter and I asked her if I could share it here.
Thanks to Eric Ries and the organizers for Lean Startup Week for allowing me to share video of my 15-minute talk from last year's event.
One reason for sharing this today is to celebrate yesterday's initial release of the in-progress version of my book Measures of Success. If you buy the book now, you'll get a PDF of the first three chapters, or about 40% of the book's expected content.
Today, I’m giving a keynote talk at the Lean & Six Sigma World Conference being held in Las Vegas. I don’t normally attend or speak at “Lean Sigma” events, but I had an opportunity to give a new talk that touches on two of my favorite themes in recent years – the need to apply statistics and psychology to our “Lean Management” practices or Six Sigma or whatever.
As a senior advisor to KaiNexus and somebody who has been a member of the team since 2011, it’s been amazing to see how the company has grown and developed. What started as a relatively simple online Kaizen application, the…
Are minor league games taking longer? Well, yes and no, depending on the league.
My next book, Measures of Success, is about the use of this Process Behavior Chart methodology in the workplace, as applied to our performance measures.
This post explores some data, how asking for more data can be more helpful, and how to use charts to evaluate a metric over time.
Joining me for Episode #303 is Craig Deao, a senior leader with Studer Group.
Today, we're talking about his book The E-Factor: How Engaged Patients, Clinicians, Leaders, and Employees Will Transform Healthcare. We'll talk about the differences between satisfaction and engagement, how to tell if people are engaged in their work, and how to engage various stakeholders, including employees, clinicians, and executives. We'll also talk about how Studer Group became a recipient of the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in 2010.
Measures matter. The proper analysis of data and performance metrics allow us to separate good changes from bad, progress from stagnation. The methods in my book, Measures of Success, help us determine if our performance is getting better, getting worse, or essentially remains unchanged. Having the right set of balanced scorecard metrics is important. But the role of leaders is important, too. How do leaders interpret measures? How do they respond to changes in metrics? How do they know if a change is worth reacting to?
Last week, a nurse manager downloaded the free first chapter of my book Lean Hospitals and wrote this message in the contact form:
"Interested to see how the disconnect between management and the staff supervised can be helped. Too many managers refuse to help those they supervise. A growing number have never done the work that they are in charge of getting done. Patients and residents feel it, not healthy. Poor PR. It does get back to the consumer. Difficult to fix at that point."
In my experience working with many hospitals, her comments resonate with me. Identifying problems like these doesn't mean Lean provides easy solutions for organizational transformation.
I'm really happy to be playing the role of host for this free webinar that's being presented next Friday, March 30th:
Engaging Leaders and the Baldrige Framework to Advance Excellence
A Look into the Extraordinary Work at Mary Greeley Medical Center
The webinar is being presented by Karen Kiel-Rosser and Ron Smith from Mary Greeley Medical Center.
If you can't attend the live session, we'll send you the recording if you register.
The throwback component of this post is a look back at a podcast that I did with Karen three years ago this month:
My guest for Episode #302 is Katie Anderson.
Today, we're chatting because I've just returned from a short trip to Japan and Katie's going back in May (and you can join her).
We're sharing observations and reflections on topics ranging from standardized work to Kaizen. Would it be easier to "implement Lean" (or whatever term you'd use) if you're a Japanese organization? And what are some of the approaches you see with quality improvement and Lean in Japan's hospitals?
Our conversation also meanders into topics like eating sushi and more.
Over the years, many people have asked me some variation of the question:
"Why are my employees not embracing Lean?"
More often than not, the tone of the question is of blame... blaming the employees for not embracing Lean.
In this post, I share something I originally wrote on LinkedIn and I'll elaborate a bit and share some of the LinkedIn comments...
