This Newbie Has a Good Grasp of Lean
I get a lot of emails from regular readers or people who have just stumbled across my blog. I try to be as helpful as I can (although I’m not really a good connection for Lean healthcare jobs that people…
Category Blog
All Blog Posts
All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Steve Jobs on Continuous Improvement: Rare 1990 Video Shows Early Lean Thinking
tl;dr: This post features a rare 1990 video of Steve Jobs describing continuous improvement in ways that closely echo Lean and Kaizen principles. He challenges “we’ve always done it this way,” stresses that people are smart and should own improvement,…
Learning Not to Blame: Baseball Edition
Following up my post about not blaming a bartender, here’s another look at learning to cast aside our old habit of blaming individuals… this time, baseball related. Modern organizations (in healthcare and business) tend to blame an individual when something…
Putting Quality First at GM: The Day I Almost Got Fired
Following up on yesterday’s post that talked about “the old GM” putting cost ahead of quality, I sometimes get flashbacks to my days working for General Motors. I once slammed a greasy connecting rod down on my manager’s desk at GM.…
Are Today’s Hospitals Too Much Like “The Old GM?”
As a former GM employee and a GM customer, I’m really fascinated by the reaction of the public, the media, and Congress to the recalls and scandal over ignition switch problems in some GM small cars from recent years. The…
How Do You Make Time for Improvement? Here are Nine Takes From Lean Experts
I’m happy to be a participating author on “The Lean Edge” blog/site that’s hosted by Michael Ballé author of The Gold Mine and other books. Their most recent question has many responses and I’ll try to help organize them for you here. Question: As CEO…
April Fool: The 10 Best Lean Management Secrets You’ll Ever Want to Learn & Use
Updated 4/2/14: Yes, this was an April Fool’s joke :-) Today, I’m really excited to share with you the 10 best Lean management secrets that I’ve compiled through my own experiences and from interviewing hundreds of Lean leaders in different industries.…
Fighting “We’ve Always Done It This Way” in Workplaces & Baseball
I found a picture (posted by Jamie Voster on LinkedIn) and I re-shared it through my account. Neither Jamie nor I know where the picture was taken or who took it (I wish I could do a better job of…
Good Questions, But With Some Misunderstandings about Lean Healthcare
In 2009, I wrote about a nurses’ union in New Brunswick that supported Lean because they realized this methodology could help reduce waiting times and improve working conditions. It’s win Yet, as part of the recent politicized Lean healthcare brew-ha-ha in…
Should Lean Consultants Be Paid a Percentage of Cost Savings?
The price paid for most management consulting work is based on either a daily rate or some variation of a flat-rate fee based on what is being delivered. Enterprise software pricing is also often fixed. In both cases, the client…
Henry Ford on Hospitals: Waste, Design, and Patient-First Care
What Henry Ford wrote about hospitals in 1922 sounds surprisingly modern. He argued for reducing nurses’ wasted motion, designing around patients, standardizing rooms, challenging professional hierarchy, and treating every process as experimental. More than a century later, many of those…
Lean Thinking: Why We Don’t Blame Individuals for Systemic Errors
TL;DR: Lean thinking teaches us not to blame individuals for mistakes that are caused by broken systems. In healthcare, this mindset aligns closely with Just Culture and patient safety principles: human error is inevitable, fear makes performance worse, and real…
