All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
This is a time of year to give thanks... I have much to be thankful for, so I'm going to start my Thanksgiving break a bit early.
Some of you might have noticed that I was battling some technical glitches and gremlins with the site this week. Working with tech support chewed up about an hour each day this week, so I lost time I might have otherwise spent creating content....
As I've been writing about "process behavior charts" - a simple, yet effective method for charting and reacting to (or not overreacting to) metrics, it's made curious what some of the modern Toyota books say about metrics and performance measures.... or at least the first two in The Toyota Way series.
I recently read this article on the IndustryWeek website:
Whirlpool's Green Takes Aim at World Class Manufacturing
Byron Green, the vice president of manufacturing for Whirlpool's 14 factories in the U.S. and Mexico, said:
"...manufacturing was littered with companies that saw lean as a collection of tools that could be deployed for a quick win. Successful companies, he said, instead see it as a bedrock of their culture."....
I bet the company that services my pool was surprised that I had a checklist-related process improvement suggestion for them after a mistake was made instead of being angry and wanting somebody punished or talked to...
In this post, I share links and information about two upcoming free webinars that I'm hosting this month, some 2018 workshops I'm doing again on better managing metrics, next year's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, and some online education about "Healthcare Kaizen" that I have opened up for public registration. Please check out all of the links, resources, and information...
My guests for Episode 292 are the three co-authors of an excellent book, Motivational Interviewing for Leadership: MI-LEAD:
Jason Wilcox, Director of Education and Connected Care at VA Roseburg
Dr. Brian Kersh, Clinical Psychologist at New Mexico VA Health System
Dr. Elizabeth Jenkins, Clinical Psychologist/Courtesy Assistant Professor at University of South Florida
If you watched this year’s World Series, you saw a lot of home runs. There were many dramatic home runs in late innings or extra innings. It might have seemed like a significantly high number. My friend Dan Markovitz asked…
In today's post, I pose a question: Should the major Lean conferences adopt or adapt a practice that's now common at tech events, including Agile and Lean Startup events: a "Code of Conduct" for participants and attendees. Is this a countermeasure to a problem that doesn't exist in the Lean community? Or, is it still good to proactively encourage people to speak up to conference organizers if they are subject to bad behavior during the event? In this post, I get feedback and thoughts from the Lean Enterprise Institute, AME, Catalysis, Lean Frontiers, and the Shingo Institute.
Today, I’d like to share the second in my series of articles about “Champions of Change.” Here, we feature my friends at Franciscan St. Francis, the health system of my Healthcare Kaizen co-author Joe Swartz. As I wrote about in the first…
Today is the start of the main two days of 2017’s Lean Startup Week event. I’m presenting tomorrow and doing the Red Bead Experiment. If you’re here, please say hi to me! You might be able to attend a live…
I recently saw a presentation by some leaders from a children’s hospital. I was really impressed that their medical quality and effectiveness leaders were outspoken advocates for Lean and Six Sigma, as was their director of process improvement. They shared…
Exactly 500 years ago today, Martin Luther famously nailed a document to a church door that pointed out problems and ideas for change and reform. He packed a lot into a single page. Was this, in a way, the first “A3”…
