All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
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." [...]
Lean healthcare really is a global movement. Last year, when I went to Japan, we had people in the group from all across Asia, Denmark, Canada, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia. Health systems all around the world need to improve…
Through our practice of Lean, we’re looking at processes and our management system, looking to identify waste and opportunities for improvement. Lean is about engaging people to have them ask why we do things a certain way or if things…
You might know the Reddit "Ask Me Anything!" (AMA) series... Greg Jacobson (from KaiNexus) and I going to do something similar Thursday as part of our KaiNexus webinar series. Ask Us Anything! Greg's a startup founder and an emergency medicine physician. There's no shortage of questions to ask him...
Here's a "Throwback Thursday" post from this date back in 2008. The post is titled, "Why Do Hospitals Have to Rely on Vigilant Patients and Families?" I think it's still an important and relevant post, here in 2015. Why do we ask patients and families to be vigilant and inspect the work being done...
Last week, as I had mentioned, was our first ever KaiNexus User Conference. We had a great time with our customers and it was amazing to see them share their progress and lessons with each other. I gave a keynote talk on “Getting Back to Basics with Lean.” We also had a professor, Ethan Burris...
