All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Here’s a thought starter for a Monday morning – I’m looking forward to hearing your perspectives. A few weeks ago, I heard a leader from a healthcare organization (one that will remain unnamed) say this: “In healthcare, we get results…
Yesterday was iPad debut day – the new product was in stores and was supposed to arrive to those who pre-ordered it via UPS. UPS… on a Saturday? Doesn’t that cost a shipper (Apple) more for Saturday? I wonder why…
Unlike Thursday’s joke, this is real. It’s a video posted by the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), featuring a full-time Lean professional, a “kaizen facilitator,” who is in the third year of coaching a youth (teenagers) hockey team in Ontario.…
Note: I edited the post title on April 3 to make it clear this was an April Fool’s Joke. Comments posted by readers on 4/1 and 4/2 may have been “fooled” – thanks for taking the joke in good spirits.…
Last month, in the midst of Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda’s appearance in front of Congress, there was a little sidebar in the USA Today that caught my eye (“Toyoda vs. Toyota“). An oft-repeated (including here in my blog) story in…
Episode #87 is a discussion with a returning guest, Steven J. Spear, DBA, author of the outstanding book Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition and How Great Companies Can Catch Up and Win. The book is due…
Sugar-coated messages are in bad taste. In survey after survey, people ask for straight talk on all issues. They don’t want artificially-sweetened words that supposedly will help the medicine—that is, the tough messages–go down. Sugar-coated messages are still a…
Being a huge fan of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, especially so some 17 years after his death, I like any article that concludes with this line: “The lesson of the Toyota recalls is not that Mr. Deming’s Japanese model is…
Dr. Donald Berwick (bio), founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has reportedly named by President Obama to head Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the organization that administers programs including Medicare and Medicaid (“Berwick to be US healthcare…
TL;DR: NPR’s “End of the Line” on NUMMI reminds us that performance problems weren’t caused by “bad workers,” but by bad management systems. The same people who sabotaged cars under GM built world-class quality under Toyota. My experience with a…
My friend and guest blogger Liz Guthridge (“The Lean Communicator”) would get a kick out of this. I was at a meeting recently and a speaker, with a background from a very famous global consulting firm, had this phrase as…
I’m a very frequent computer user and I’m pretty good with the ole’ shortcut keys, on both Mac and Windows (I’m bi-lingual). I remember when I’ve had hospital teams as clients, I’d often show them how to do basic things…
