All Posts on Lean Blog

As a senior advisor to KaiNexus and somebody who has been a member of the team since 2011, it's been amazing to see how the company has grown and developed. What started as a relatively simple online Kaizen application, the brainchild of…
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Are minor league games taking longer? Well, yes and no, depending on the league. My next book, Measures of Success, is about the use of this Process Behavior Chart methodology in the workplace, as applied to our performance measures.…
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Measures matter. The proper analysis of data and performance metrics allow us to separate good changes from bad, progress from stagnation. The methods in my upcoming book, Measures of Success, help us determine if our performance is getting…
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Last week, a nurse manager downloaded the free first chapter of my book Lean Hospitals and wrote this message in the contact form: "Interested to see how the disconnect between management and the staff supervised can be helped. Too many…
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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. You can follow me @MarkGraban and join the fun and the…
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I'm really happy to be playing the role of host for this free webinar that's being presented next Friday, March 30th: Engaging Leaders and the Baldrige Framework to Advance Excellence A Look into the Extraordinary Work at Mary Greeley…
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My guest for Episode #302 is Katie Anderson. Today, we're chatting because I've just returned from a short trip to Japan and Katie's going back in May (and you can join her). We're sharing observations and reflections on topics…
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Over the years, many people have asked me some variation of the question: "Why are my employees not embracing Lean?" More often than not, the tone of the question is of blame... blaming the employees for not embracing Lean. In this…
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Today, I'd like to share the latest in my series of articles about "Champions of Change," which is based on a discussion I had with Joe Swartz about continuous improvement in materials and supply chain settings.
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In this post, I'm sharing tweets from my recent trip to Japan.  I've added a few photos I posted on Instagram, as well. 
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Today, I'd like to share the latest in my series of articles about "Champions of Change," which is based on a discussion I had with Suzi Collins, an experienced Lean healthcare supply chain leader.
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Monday, I blogged about the sushi-making class I took on my last Sunday in Japan. Later that same Sunday, I did a walking food tour in the Shibuya area. Walking food tours are a great way to explore and learn about a city. In our small…
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I’ve heard a lot of rumblings recently about what might be happening at ThedaCare, a health system in Wisconsin that’s been considered one of the best examples of "Lean healthcare" anywhere in the world for more than a decade. It seems that…
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Last week, I got back from my third trip to Japan and we visited three hospitals, Toyota, another manufacturer, and heard from a cafeteria services company leader about their Lean and continuous improvement journeys. As I've blogged about…
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I sometimes try to share some light or funny on Fridays to get into the weekend with a laugh. I want to thank @BrianSJ on Twitter for his tweet pointing me to a hilarious video from a British TV show "That Mitchell and Webb Look."
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As I blogged about yesterday, things went well at the Oscars... or, at least, no errors were made in the announcements. But that thing that didn't go well was the TV ratings. Two Data Points Are Not a Trend The headlines I saw had a lot…
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Tomorrow, my post will be about headlines that scream about ratings for The Oscars being "down from last year" or "the lowest in X years." As I've blogged about before, I'm always skeptical of such simplistic comparisons that might mask the…
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