All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Thanks to ExecutiveInsight for publishing my article: “Instituting a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Kaizen encourages low-impact improvements that can have a big payoff for healthcare providers.” The principles of kaizen are not that complicated. But, organizations do require discipline and…
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with the help of Michael George, tried injecting talk of so-called “Lean Six Sigma” into the 2012 presidential race, but I think it was received as a bit of a novelty topic that illustrated the…
Recently, the Wall Street Journal put some focus on the issue of so-called “door to balloon” times in our hospitals. “Door to balloon” is a measure of time from a patient with a serious type of heart attack (“STEMI“) arriving…
When I kicked off the “Lean Memes” contest last month, I had no idea what I was starting… I figured I’d get a handful of entries. Well, I got well over 100 from a number of people, including 5 or…
As the creator of the admittedly awkward L.A.M.E. acronym (meaning Lean As Mistakenly Explained or Lean As Misguidedly Executed), one burden is that I often get emails tipping me off to L.A.M.E. sightings. In a nutshell, it’s L.A.M.E. when a…
Here are two blog posts that my co-author, Joe Swartz, and I were very happy to see about our book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements: From the Virginia Mason Medical Center Blog: “Could this new book…
As I worked on co-authoring Healthcare Kaizen, I dove deeper into my study of “kaizen” practices and mindsets, revisiting many core books on kaizen after years of practice in different industries. I used to define kaizen as the phrase it’s…
In commemoration of the 11th anniversary of 9/11, I’m leaving the blog blank today – other than a link to Steven J. Spear’s piece that appeared in this space a year ago today: “Bin Laden Lost.”
Organizations that are most successful with Kaizen and continuous improvement don’t have fancier boards or better software — they have leaders who are more likely engaged with the right behaviors, more consistently. In my experience, I’ve put the same mechanics…
Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for FierceHealthcare.com called “How lean management helped hospitals avoid layoffs.” Here in 2012, I see headlines daily about a hospital somewhere in the U.S. who is “forced” to lay off staff (or…
It’s a double reader letter day… I was asked, by a healthcare professional, about where she could find Lean Healthcare conferences. I’ll share my list and links below, both the events focused on Lean Healthcare as well as those with…
I received a question from a reader, which I’m sharing and posing here (with the reader’s permission and removing identifying information). The question: Having only a year of experience in the healthcare industry, and almost 30 years of (quality and…
