All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Thanks to those of you who pre-ordered the 3rd edition of my book Lean Hospitals. Click below to read a free preview from the book, the start of the chapter on leading and engaging employees (arguably, it’s all about leadership). Improving the…
I’m a car guy. Above all other mechanical devices that we engineers get to be involved with, I am fascinated most with these incredible machines. When you consider how automobile soperate nearly flawlessly even when enduring a spectrum of environmental…
I’ve known Dr. Mark Jaben for a while now… we share not just a similar sounding name, but also a passion for healthcare improvement. You can hear my 2014 podcast with him about change and brain science. He’s recently written…
Today’s the first day of the two-day Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, an annual event that’s being held this year near Miami. If you’re at the Summit, please find me to say hello. You can follow the event on Twitter using…
Joining me for Episode #253 is Ash Maurya, author of the book Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works and his latest, being released this week, called Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth. Ash is an entrepreneur…
tl;dr: Lean doesn’t mean “zero inventory” — and it doesn’t mean eliminating waiting rooms either. In both manufacturing and healthcare, low inventory and less waiting are outcomes of capable, reliable processes, not goals to chase through absolutes. For decades, manufacturers…
Yesterday was an exciting day for me, professionally and personally, as I received my first copies of the 3rd edition of my book Lean Hospitals (I’ll stop blogging about the book so much, I promise). This is the fifth time I’ve had…
TL;DR: In the 1980s and ’90s, GM spent roughly $90 billion trying to automate its way to competitiveness. Toyota took a different path–focusing on management systems, culture, and engaging people to improve processes. The results weren’t accidental, and the lesson…
Some of you reading this might remember the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement of the late 1980s and 1990s. Many would look back and label it a “fad.” As I’ve said about Lean, it’s only a fad to those who are susceptible to fads. As I blogged about in 2006, management is often prone to...
This episode is sponsored by StoreSMART. My guest for episode #252 is Jordan Peck, a Senior Director in the Center for Performance Improvement at MaineHealth and Maine Medical Center. Jordan and I first met when he was a graduate student…
As the 3rd edition of my book Lean Hospitals is starting to ship, I’m having some great conversations with people about the “State of Lean Healthcare” in 2016 (as much as one can generalize). Two of those conversations about the book…
Now, there’s a story written by an emergency medicine physician, Dr. Brad Cotton, that appears in a publication called “Emergency Medicine News” — FIRST PERSON: ‘We Fired Our Hospital’...
