All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Family Business – WSJ.com In today’s WSJ, there’s a review of a new book called Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting, in the mold of the excellent book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Who…
Great news! This is quite an honor and I’m very excited. My book, Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction has been awarded a Research and Professional Publication Award by the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence. I just found…
Thanks to visibility from my blog and my book, Lean Hospitals, I get a number of questions from people about how to transition into healthcare from other industries, people who have great Lean experience in manufacturing or retail, for example.…
Starbucks Gossip: Starbucks tests “lean” operations in Ohio and Kentucky stores We’ve known for some time that Starbucks has been trying to figure out how to use Lean principles in their stores. If you click on the “Starbucks” tag at…
Got this question from a reader: After successful application of lean to clinical processes we are moving into the the finance/accounting transaction areas such as A/P and A/R and month end close and are finding a more difficult road to…
A Garden party – Nowadays, the games are just part of the show While we’re on the topic of basketball (thanks to Jamie’s post last Thursday for the NCAA playoffs), I wanted to talk about the NBA. This example might…
Following up on these two earlier posts (here and here)… I’ll quit calling them the “Idiot Corporation of America” since the Peanut Corporation of America is bankrupt and shutting down. I feel bad for those who are losing jobs due…
So it’s Sunday morning, I have a cup of coffee at the ready… nice quiet, peaceful, sunny Sunday morning (you can tell we don’t have kids). Last Sunday, my wife and I went to a local restaurant that had been…
Hospitals See Benefits of Lean and Six Sigma Regular readers know I often write about what I termed “L.A.M.E.” — Lean as Misguidedly Executed. The ASQ (American Society for Quality) survey that I linked to at the top probably just…
by Dan Markovitz Best Buy is generally not talked about as an exemplar of lean. (It’s best known for its Results Only Work Environment; read about ROWE here and here.) But yesterday’s WSJ article on Best Buy shows that the…
As March Madness begins, many people’s eyes will be fixed to TVs and computer screens while they root for the favorite teams. Where’s the lesson for Lean in there? It comes in exactly the winners and losers – may the…
I’ve always been a huge Simpsons fan, even if the show has gotten less funny in the past few years (flame away on that topic, if you must). The beginning of the this week’s episode made me chuckle a bit.…
