All Posts on Lean Blog

Happy Halloween! I'll actually be home to hand out treats as a countermeasure for possible tricks. A year ago, I did a KaiNexus webinar on Halloween that was a lot of fun... there were only two complaints about elements of my costume,…
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When I was in Brazil recently (read more), one of the presenters at the Lean Six Sigma Conference was Bruno Kosima, pictured at left. He is the department chief of the Latin American / Caribbean group that teaches the Toyota Production…
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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients If you set a target without providing a clear path on how you want it achieved, and then punish staff when they fail to achieve it, then staff will achieve the target - by any means…
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Last month, I had an opportunity to visit the Toyota North American Headquarters that's now near me in Plano, Texas. Thanks to the MIT Club of Dallas / Fort Worth and the Public Relations Society of America chapter for creating this…
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When I blogged a summary of my recent Brazil trip, I said I'd write more about my visit to a hospital... so here's that post. Thanks again to my hosts, Gemba Group, the consulting and training firm that has been helping the hospital…
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Here's an article from Bloomberg BusinessWeek: GE's Larry Culp Faces Ultimate CEO Test in Trying to Save a Once-Great Company Very early on, the article mentions Culp's advocacy for "Toyota-style lean manufacturing." Or is he pushing…
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I got back Sunday morning from my first trip to Brazil. I had a great time last week as a guest of a company called Gemba Group. I was treated incredibly well and I had a great time with them in the city of Curitiba. There were many…
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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Transformation and quality improvement is rarely sustained without changing management behaviours and management systems. John Toussaint writes about the challenges of adopting lean …
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Thanks to the Measures of Success reader who reached out with a question about their hospital's display of data in units and departments. They shared the current state method for displaying data and asked me to compare it to a Process…
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Here is a review and summary of my book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More that was posted on LinkedIn by Manasi Kekan MD MSBE MMM FACP. Thanks to Dr. Kekan for writing it. She shares a dramatized scenario…
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The Major League Baseball regular season has ended, so there's an opportunity to revisit some posts about statistics, variation, and Process Behavior Charts. Bryce Harper's Performance In August, I wrote this post about Bryce…
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Last week was our fifth annual KaiNexus User Conference (or "KaiNexicon" as we now call it). One of our keynote speakers was Jess Orr, a former Toyota engineer who shared perspectives on what it was like to now lead continuous…
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In the practice of Lean and continuous improvement, people often describe small improvements as "Just Do Its." Maybe they should be called "Just Do Thems" in the plural, but that's not the point of my post here. The "Do" in "Just Do It"…
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In many organizations, leaders rely on red / green color coding to evaluate metrics. They often see a single data point compared to a goal. I've seen in this in the context of "Lean Daily Management" (although I don't think it's something…
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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Globally, at least 5 patients die every minute due to unsafe care.  For Patient Safety Week, the World Health Organization is calling for urgent action to reduce patient harm in…
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