All Posts on Lean Blog

The first part of this post is a pretty long introduction before sharing quotes and views from an article that raises concerns about Lean at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospsital (ZSFGH) in San Francisco. In general, the following…
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Joining me today for Episode #330 of the podcast is Christoph Roser, a professor of production management at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in Germany. He has decades of experience with Lean manufacturing including…
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I was honored to get to present with my friend Chip Ponsford, DVM at the Veterinary Leadership Conference that was held this month by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Check out Chip's blog and book on Lean for veterinary…
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Reminder: Today is the last day to enter the giveaway contest that's giving away a set of two books: My book Measures of Success and Jeff Hunter's book Patient-Centered Strategy. ---Click here to enter. A key Kaizen principle is…
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Mark's note: Mike Sporer has commented a few times on blog posts and I invited him to write this guest post after we exchanged some emails about his recent experience as a hospital patient. Mike Sporer I recently had a surgical…
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Thanks to Ron Pereira and the team at Gemba Academy for having me as a guest for the sixth time on their Gemba Academy Podcast (find past episodes via Google). Here is a direct MP3 link to the episode, click below, or see the embedded…
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Thanks to Catalysis for asking me to write a guest blog post... yesterday, they published this: Being Open to Learning and Using Process Behavior Charts Means Unlearning Something Else My post starts: "Why don't people adopt best…
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Joining me today for Episode #329 of the podcast is Mike Eisenberg, the director, editor, and producer of the film "To Err is Human," a documentary about the incredibly important issue of patient safety. The film shares a title…
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Let's commemorate Monday's national holiday for Dr. King with a look back at my post from 2012: A Lean Lesson from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And, a quote that should remind folks of Kaizen and continuous improvement: (hat…
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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Too often, patient involvement in design and research is tokenist or "tick-box", and requires burdensome processes for participation. To truly design around the patient,…
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Here's the latest installment of "Key Tweets," a (usually) weekly post that presents some of my tweets (or retweets) from the week, including pictures and other interesting stuff. I sometimes also re-share items that I've posted on…
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Mark's Note: Today's post is written by Ken Segel, the managing director of Value Capture, LLC. This is the first of what I hope will be many contributions from the Value Capture team. In the spirit of transparency, I should mention that I…
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The "Miracle on the Hudson" was 10 years ago today. Read my blog post about hearing Sully speak at an event last year. I got my first (and only) iPad in early 2014. I use many Apple products, but I'm hardly an early adopter. I don't…
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My guests for Episode #328 are Bette Gardner and Jeff Heil, of the company Breakthrough Learning. Bette is the creator of a fantastic simulation called "Friday Night at the ER" -- which I've blogged about. When we recorded the…
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When I had the chance to go back to Japan last October with Honsha, there was a big focus on what the former Toyota people kept referring to as "a development company." The meaning was that Toyota (and companies with similar performance)…
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It's a big week for American football. Monday was the College Football Playoff championship game. Alabama, led by Nick Saban and his "Process" were defeated by Clemson. Tomorrow and Sunday bring us the second round of NFL playoff games. …
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We have to be careful with text descriptions of business metrics -- this is true when it's numbers in the news or performance measures in our own organization. From my use of "Process Behavior Charts" (see my book Measures of Success),…
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It's said in the Lean methodology that "value is defined by the customer." Value can be defined as, in most cases, "Something the customer is willing to pay for." In healthcare, this gets complicated when patients aren't the ones…
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