All Posts on Lean Blog

I was prompted today to think about an excerpt from my book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement: "In many hospital settings, staffing levels are set by benchmarking data, rules of thumb, habit,…
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You're a retailing or manufacturing executive who hasn't heard of MIT's "Beer Game" management simulator? Then you're probably swimming in a lot of excess inventory. If you're an executive who also incorrectly thinks that "just in…
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I try not to use the word "Lean" as an adjective that means "better." We see this a lot online, the so-called "Lean boarding pass" or other such things. If "Lean" becomes a synonym for "good" then it doesn't really mean much. For me,…
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Thanks as always to Ryan McCormick for this... there's always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! News, blogs, articles, resources, and links about creating value, continuous improvement, innovation, and…
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I've updated and am republishing an old 2005 blog post that I wrote about a former GM assembly worker, Ben Hamper, who has some very funny stories in his book, Rivethead: Tales From the Assembly Line. One story, in particular, is from…
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We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the publication of the book that I co-authored with Joe Swartz called Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements. I'll share more reflections about…
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This is an article that I originally published on LinkedIn back in 2015. Has the error proofing been improved since then, between credit card websites and apps? "Lean" is a business philosophy and management system that is most…
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Normally, I like to be the one doing the interviewing. My latest guest on "My Favorite Mistake" was Alisha Wielfaert, who shared her "favorite mistake" story about starting a yoga studio that failed. It's a favorite mistake because she…
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Originally posted a few years ago, I'm reposting this for the holiday here in the U.S.
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I recently saw this article in the Washington Post: This MLB season, the ball is making everyone batty Major League Baseball has been trying to reduce variation in the production of the balls that are used in games, as I've written…
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Since I host a podcast about mistakes ("My Favorite Mistake"), this is a topic I think about a lot. I hear about people's "favorite" professional mistakes and I reflect on my own. This headline naturally caught my eye last week: …
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