All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
tl;dr: A nurse nearly administered vecuronium instead of vancomycin but caught the error before it reached the patient. The near miss shows how outcome bias and underreporting distort safety data: when leaders see only errors that cause harm, they may…
For years, I’ve been asking a very specific question about Lean history: Where was Toyota’s first andon cord? Jeff Liker didn’t know. Neither did Isao Yoshino. I’ve asked other former Toyota people. Toyota histories and books about the development of…
Formerly known as “Lean Whiskey” Listen: In Season 2, Episode 9, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh recap the World Cup, declare a “dealer’s choice” coffee round, and wade into a very full news roundup of robots, layoffs, and quality turnarounds.…
The Lean transformation failure rate might be the longest-running meme in our field. You have seen the claim on LinkedIn, in keynotes, and in consulting decks: 70 percent of Lean transformations fail. Sometimes it is 90 percent. Nobody ever has…
A pitch from a personal injury law firm showed up in my inbox. The subject line was about older workers dying on the job. The numbers were real. I checked them against the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Census of Fatal…
I just got back from a vacation that included some time in Greece. On the way to the airport, we stopped for a slow, delicious breakfast at a seaside cafe. Excellent food, better view. Check out the menu and some…
A nurse executive posted on LinkedIn this week about what she called “assembly-line medicine.” She was describing an ambulatory surgery center where she once worked, where physicians booked roughly 80 percent of the day’s procedures into a six-hour window. Then…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
A close family member spent time in a hospital ICU recently. The clinical care, as far as I could tell, was excellent. The nurses were attentive. The physicians explained things clearly, and more than once. I’m grateful, and I don’t…
Most Lean programs treat standardized work and kaizen as opposites. Standardized work is the rigid part. Kaizen is the creative part. One constrains, the other improves. Pick whichever side you prefer and argue with the other camp at the next…
The kaizen board held a couple dozen sheets. Each one numbered, each one stamped “jisshi-zumi” — already done. A board full of carried-out improvements is a strong sign in any factory, in any country. But that wasn’t the part that…
Twenty years ago this month, I recorded the first episode of Lean Blog Interviews. My guest was Norman Bodek, who spent decades studying Toyota and introducing American audiences to the work of people, including Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo. I’m…
