All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Mark’s note: I am thrilled to be able to bring you this guest post from my friend and fellow lean healthcare author Naida Grunden. Her post (and Sully’s words) are far more important than anything I could write today. Read…
Mark’s note: It’s great to welcome Andy Wagner back to the blog. Read his older posts here. General Motors, Chrysler, and Toyota have been dominating the headlines in recent months with their financial and, now, quality troubles, while some surprising…
In recent years, healthcare has been learning a lot of lessons from aviation — including checklists and “Crew Resource Management,” as written about in the excellent books The Checklist Manifesto and Why Hospitals Should Fly. Aviation has gotten much…
My friend and neighbor Ron Pereira (his blog and twitter pages) is a partner in the Gemba Academy online Lean training efforts. Yes, neighbor. We live about two miles apart in Texas. Seriously. Anyhoo, Gemba Academy is celebrating its first…
Episode #86 is a conversation with David Lawrence Sundahl, PhD, Managing Director of Rule 4 Consulting. They are a firm that works with healthcare providers to drive improvements using Lean and what they call “Adaptive Design” methodologies. Sundahl was a…
Regular followers of my blog know that I’ve been creating audio podcasts since 2006. Later today (at 3 PM), I am publishing #86 in the series, an interview with David Sundahl, PhD of Rule 4 Consulting. I’ve made mistakes every…
Today, I’ll simply point you to a blog post by Mitch Ditkoff called “Top 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating.” Many, if not all of these could apply to not improving a process, not embracing Lean, not doing “kaizen” each…
TL;DR: The Olympic gold-medal puck was almost lost not because of bad intent, but because the system relied on people remembering under chaotic conditions. The real lesson is timeless: leaders must design processes that account for human fallibility instead of…
Those who follow Lean healthcare know that Virginia Mason Medical Center, in Seattle, is one of the world’s leaders in improving care through Lean methods. They were featured last year on the CBS Evening News, for example. The LeanROI.org site,…
Stepping away from serious issues, let’s talk about things that can really get heated — like washers and dryers (rim shot). Sorry for the bad joke… plus, I’m a drummer, so I love the chance to do a nice rim…
Episode #85 is a conversation with David Meier, a former Toyota Georgetown Group Leader and the co-author of the books The Toyota Way Fieldbook and Toyota Talent: Developing Your People the Toyota Way. With Toyota facing widespread attention during the 2010…
I will try to be careful with this topic, since I’m obviously not a doctor. Criticism of doctors gets thrown around pretty easily around many hospitals, too much so, I think. You sometimes hear blanket criticisms about doctors being difficult,…
