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It's a big week for American football. Monday was the College Football Playoff championship game. Alabama, led by Nick Saban and his "Process" were defeated by Clemson. Tomorrow and Sunday bring us the second round of NFL playoff games. …
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We have to be careful with text descriptions of business metrics -- this is true when it's numbers in the news or performance measures in our own organization. From my use of "Process Behavior Charts" (see my book Measures of Success),…
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It's said in the Lean methodology that "value is defined by the customer." Value can be defined as, in most cases, "Something the customer is willing to pay for." In healthcare, this gets complicated when patients aren't the ones…
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Thanks to the Lean Enterprise Institute for publishing my article about Kaizen, new habits, and New Year's resolutions: Take Baby Steps Towards Improvement "As 2019 begins, don't feel bad if your New Year's resolutions have…
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Last week, Herb Kelleher passed away. He was the legendary founder, CEO, and Chairman of Southwest Airlines. Southwest posted a nice tribute photo of him on the front of their website and also put up a special website HonoringHerb.org. …
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Hi All -  here's a collection of the most read Mixtape links from 2018.  I compiled the links with the greatest number of viewers and then organized them into some themes.  Enjoy! Setting goals and developing effective and actionable…
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Happy New Year! It's a time of year when we think about improvement and goals for the year. We do this in our organizations and we do so on a personal level. Today's blog post is a transcript of a KaiNexus podcast that I did with Jess…
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Reflections from Lean Leaders is a compilation of transcripts from some of my Lean Blog Podcast interviews over the past 12+ years. I originally published it through Leanpub.com, but I've made it, for now, an Amazon…
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Thanks to Tracy O'Rourke and Elizabeth Swan for allowing me to be a guest on their "Just in Time Cafe" podcast. You can listen to the episode (and subscribe) via this page or use the streaming player that's below: Podcast:…
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It was a busy year for me in the podcast realm. I produced 33 "Lean Blog Podcast" episodes of interviews about the various aspects of Lean. Click here to view them all (to listen, really... but each page has show notes). I was going to…
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Here are the ten most-read posts of the year, according to Google Analytics (popularity doesn't imply quality, but it's interesting to see what people are reading and sharing) -- data from July 1 through December 7.
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Here's a holiday treat for my regular Lean Blog readers and podcast listeners, a song parody, originally released back in 2009: "Gemba Claus is Comin' to Town"…
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Mark's Note: I've known Ryan McCormack for many years now, thanks to his previous work in Lean healthcare and his attendance at Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit events. He's been sending out an excellent curated email on Operational…
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Today marks 25 years since W. Edwards Deming passed away in 1993. I remember sitting in a statistics class as an undergraduate at Northwestern University -- it must have been January 1994. My professor said something about Dr. Deming's…
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One of my books with my book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More was to reach audiences that haven't heard of "Process Behavior Charts" (aka Control Charts or Statistical Process Control). I recently had the…
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My guest for Episode #327 of the podcast is Marc Rouppe van der Voort, Ph.D., who is joining me from Utrecht in the Netherlands. We first met back in 2009 when he invited me to come speak at a Dutch Lean Healthcare conference (which I…
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This post is Part Three of a series on using Process Behavior Charts for snapshot comparisons (of individuals, departments, or organizations) instead of the more common-use with time-series performance metrics over time. Check out all of…
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This post is a continuation of my last post that introduced the idea of using Process Behavior Charts (PBCs) for something other than time-series data (a metric or performance measure over time):…
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