All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Here is a great video by Masaaki Imai, author of the classic books Kaizen: The Key To Japan’s Competitive Success and Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to Management. In the video, he emphasizes that kaizen means continuous improvement and…
Today’s episode is a chat with Jody Crane, MD, MBA and Chuck Noon, PhD. They are talking about their outstanding book The Definitive Guide to Emergency Department Operational Improvement: Employing Lean Principles with Current ED Best Practices to Create the…
I’m a proud graduate of Northwestern University, industrial engineering class of 1995. Our ’95 commencement speaker was the newly installed president of the university… he delivered a pretty dry address and the students were pretty disappointed. That 1995 address was…
Last week, at the 2nd annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, I moderated the CEO Panel discussion that featured four excellent Lean leaders: Jim FitzPatrick of Mercy Medical Center (North Iowa), Scott Armstrong (Group Health), Alan Gleghorn (Christie Clinic), and Dr.…
In today’s post, I’m happy to introduce Dr. Les Muda, the World’s First Lean Healthcare Comedian. First and perhaps the last. Dr. Muda sent me an audition tape after his experience at last week’s successful Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. As…
Today, I’m announcing an evolution of my work life: doing less with the Lean Enterprise Institute, doing more consulting and speaking, and starting to help build an exciting startup company, KaiNexus. The first 16 years of my career has been…
Yesterday, we lost a great guru in the process and business improvement worlds, Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who passed away at the age of 64. Goldratt is the author of many books including The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. I’m…
I met Newt Gingrich at the Ontario Hospital Association conference in late 2009, as I blogged about here: “Meeting Newt Gingrich, a Lean Champion.” Yesterday morning, I was told that Newt had given an endorsement of the use of Lean…
We had a great first day at our Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit in Seattle (with lots of tweets from attendees you can follow along with). The Summit concludes with Day 2 today. One of the plenary presenters was Dr. Michel…
There was an interesting article in the most recent Inc. Magazine called “Domestic Medical Tourism: How one company is saving businesses big bucks on employee medical treatments.” Much of the talk about “medical tourism” has focused on patients flying halfway…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is from Dr. Mark Jaben. I first met Mark in person at Cindy Jimmerson’s Lean Healthcare West conference in Montana last year. I’m happy to publish this new guest post to follow up his previous…
This one got stuck in the “stuff to blog about” pile for a few months, but HBR published a gem of an article called “How To Stop the Blame Game.” Dr. Deming always talked about how destructive blame could be,…
