All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Recently, I shared the famed 1980 NBC documentary, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” that essentially introduced W. Edwards Deming to a mainstream Western business audience. Today, I’m going to share some highlights and thoughts from Part 1 the program…
Thursday is the American holiday of Thanksgiving, so I'm going to take the rest of the week off (and many of you will be out of the office). The end of the year is a time to reflect. Paul Akers is the latest person to reflect on their early days of Lean practice by contributing a new chapter...
I have a SMALL favor to ask of you, as a Lean Blog reader… I’m currently working on my public registration workshop calendar for 2016, which includes these workshops: “Healthcare Kaizen” and “Experience Change” Please help me gauge demand for workshops in different locations by filling out this short form IF you would be interested in...
The W. Edwards Deming Institute and Dr. Deming's grandson Kevin Cahill worked with NBC to make the 1980 program available, giving the institute perpetual rights to it (see their blog post). To the institute's credit, they've made this freely available on YouTube.
For the Lean minded individual, Spike’s “Bar Rescue” is so much more than just a television show. It is basically a weekly, or binge-watched, case study on process improvement in bars across the country. “Bar Rescue” is another example of how any industry can benefit from continuous improvement.
As I mentioned the past two days (see my posts from Tuesday and Wednesday about “The Five Whys”), I was at the annual Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco. If this is all new to you, below are some of my posts…
There’s no magic about the number five. I’ve seen some people write that five is somehow a “magic number.” No, that’s not really the case. Ask why more than once, probably more than twice…
We don’t just ask why. We start by properly defining and clarifying problems. Jumping straight to Five Whys is like jumping straight to “Learn” in the Lean Startup Build-Measure-Learn cycle.
Today’s guest is Mitch Cahn, president of Unionwear, a manufacturer of hats, bags, and apparel in Newark, NJ. I first learned about Mitch and his company because of a display they had at the Northeast LEAN Conference, which I blogged about here. What caught my eye was their display of politician hats they produce, including the...
Today, I'm announcing a new podcast series called the Toyota Kata Podcast, or "KataCast" for short. As the Toyota Kata book and methodology have become more popular, I've been surprised that I haven't been asked "why don't you blog more about Toyota Kata?" [...]
Mark's note: Today's guest post is a return visit by Gert Linthout, from Belgium. Gert and I were part of the same Lean healthcare study trip to Japan back in 2012... Once upon a time... It was some years ago, when we guided a Lean transformation project in a regional hospital. The ambition was to drastically improve...
Lean is, of course, not about a better way to build cars. It's a transferrable philosophy, management system, and methodology that is being applied in many different settings and industries, including healthcare. I'm often told (sometimes by somebody who is being sort of huffy): "Patients are not cars." [...]
