All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
One project I’m involved with at the LEI is an online video education event on the topic of “strategy deployment,” confusing known also as “hoshin kanri” or “hoshin planning” or “policy deployment.” I know, let’s pick a name already. This…
As I’m currently in Sweden, I was reminded of this video I found recently featuring John Black, a lean healthcare consultant and author who previously worked with Boeing and Gary Larson, a Vice President from Park Nicollet in Minneapolis (a…
Dan Pink’s new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, has been getting a lot of press recently, and deservedly so. He demonstrates persuasively not only that people are self-motivated by the desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose, but…
Note from 2026: I first published this in 2010. The idea that Lean is loving care came from clinicians at St. Elisabeth Hospital in Tilburg, the Netherlands, and it has held up better than most of what I wrote that…
Sorry, the hospital had reconsidered and they asked me to take the video down. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.
TL;DR: Data is what gets recorded. Facts are what’s actually happening. Confusing the two is how leaders get fooled by faked reports, broken sensors, and decorated dashboards. Deming and Ohno both warned about this in different ways. The fix is…
Yesterday, I was in the first day of two for John Shook’s “Managing to Learn” class about A3 management here at the Lean Enterprise Institute. The class is based on the book of the same name. In this course, I…
This news story, “Ottawa Hospital seeks fourth MRI machine,” from Ottawa describes an unfortunate situation where 90% of patients had been waiting 360 days for an MRI. So the hospital added capacity – by adding a third MRI machine (an…
… the United Kingdom. Following up on the question I posed last week, asking readers to guess the percentage of U.S. blog readership and the country that’s #2 in the list. Click on the map for a complete view and…
One of my goals for the next few weeks is to catch up on blogging about some great speakers I’ve seen recently. Coming soon, a post about seeing Dr. Atul Gawande (The Checklist Manifesto) and Daniel Pink (Drive) in the…
Saturday’s Wall Street Journal had an article (“11 Minutes of Action“) with analysis that said something my wife noticed a long time ago – there’s a lot of standing around during an NFL football game (or any football game, for…
It’s been a while since I’ve done a “What You’re Searching For” Post, where I pull out items from my blog’s stats, the keyword searches that bring people to this site – the common, the uncommon, and the strange.
