All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Many industries face the compliance conundrum. The compliance conundrum occurs when staying in regulatory compliance interferes with business as usual operations. In highly regulated industries, where regulating bodies conduct periodic audits, the strain of the compliance conundrum is even more apparent.
For today’s Throwback Thursday, I somehow stumbled across this video on YouTube… it’s a video from 1946 that was produced by General Motors, their industrial engineering staff, the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University), and the University of Iowa.
As is often the case, I have too many open browser tabs full of articles that I was going to potentially blog about. This slows down my Mac (thanks, Chrome!) and it’s mental overhead… So, it’s time for me to…
In this 2015 conversation, John Dyer reflects on his career at General Electric — including attending Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s four-day seminar and a smaller follow-on course — and what happened when he took Deming’s 14 Points back to GE…
It's the Labor Day holiday in the United States today, so I'm trying to minimize my own labor (that said, I'll be working a bit... on the 3rd revised edition of my book Lean Hospitals... by choice... and not for an hourly wage). Many people ARE working today, including folks at the grocery store, the gym, and other stops I might make.
Mark’s Note: Today’s guest post is by Paul Critchley and while it shares a story from a manufacturing company, I could see a situation like this taking place in healthcare or in any large organization that doesn’t quite get what…
This conversation with Zeynep Ton explores why treating labor as a cost creates operational failure — and how the Good Jobs Strategy offers a Lean-aligned alternative built on stable schedules, slack, and respect for people. Labor Day is Monday, so…
Many of you might not care, but it’s football season. Major college football starts tomorrow night and the NFL kicks off their season next Thursday. On that note, if you’d like to “kick off” a Kaizen approach to continuous improvement…
Back in 2011, I asked for and received some great input from readers about updating a chapter for the second edition of my book Lean Hospitals on “A Vision for Lean Hospitals.” A lot has changed in the healthcare environment over four…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is by Rodrigo Bernal, with the first post on this site contributed from Mexico. Rodrigo uses a lunch outing to raise important questions about customer focus and the voice of the customer. If there is a…
I stumbled across an article from the Inc. magazine archives from 1987, so it’s today’s “Throwback Thursday.” In 1987, I was starting high school and that was probably right about the time when my dad, an engineer for General Motors,…
As I mentioned on Monday, I’m working on a 3rd revised edition of my book Lean Hospitals. Traditional book publishing is a funny (and sometimes frustrating) value stream, in a lot of ways. There are many batches and many queues along…
