All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Thanks to Healthcare Finance News for interviewing me for this piece they ran this week: “7 ways lean healthcare management reduces cost.” As I think the piece conveys, cost reduction comes as a result mainly from methods that are different…
Preventable medical mistakes remain one of the most serious challenges in healthcare, yet many hospitals still struggle with learning from medical errors and preventing them from happening again. From emergency departments to pathology labs, the same types of errors continue…
In the “Lean Startup” parlance, our startup KaiNexus is not going into an existing market – we are working to develop a new market (for improvement management software). We have competitors – but they tend to be Excel, SharePoint, and…
Most of us think of Kaizen as a workplace method. Robert Maurer applies it to therapy, health, and relationships — and the brain science he describes explains a lot about why change efforts fail at work, too. We talk about…
In conjunction with my publisher, Productivity Press (CRC Press), we’ve produced a short author video where I’m addressing some questions they wanted me to answer about our new book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements. The video:
In this month’s ASQ blog post, their CEO Paul Borawski writes a new post “The Intersection of Quality and Social Responsibility,” where he defines Social Responsibility succinctly as “Doing well by doing good.” One reason I have always been attracted…
I’ve probably seen the “Current Condition” portion of the fantastic “Toast Kaizen” DVD (from GBMP) more than a hundred times over the past seven years. At the end, when Bruce learns that his wife wants raisin toast (when he makes…
The PDSA cycle (Plan, Do, Study, Adjust) is at the heart of Lean problem solving. Most of these mistakes cluster in the Plan phase, where the temptation to skip ahead is strongest. A few live in Study and Adjust, where…
Interesting article here: “Case in Point: Avoiding martial-arts moves by ‘pulling the Andon cord‘” that was in the Washington Post, of all places. The piece, written by a duo of a professor and a consultant, attempts (I think) to make…
My guest for podcast #152 is Matt Stewart, and we are talking about his book The Walk-On: Inside Northwestern’s Rise From Cellar Dweller To Big Ten Champ. Matt and I are both graduates of Northwestern University. While he played football on…
I think this post is both urgent and important… Dr. Stephen Covey has passed away, at age 79. Read Tom Peters’ tribute to Dr. Covey here, which includes: One simply cannot pay tribute to Stephen Covey without saying at the…
In this post, I’d like to share a nice 7-minute video from St. Clair Hospital in Pittsburgh, showing the transition from an inefficient “par level” system (that often led to stock outs for nursing supplies) to a two-bin kanban system…
