All Posts on Lean Blog

I've dropped the Kindle price of my book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More to $2.99 as a way to spur sales and to get the book in front of more people. I shared a bit about this on LinkedIn (and, yeah, Amazon's…
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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients A group of Winnipeg physicians is opening a clinic designed to treat non-emergent patients in an effort to reduce Emergency Room overcrowding. Tom Brodbeck of the…
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I haven't read it, but Marie Kondo's book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has been a pop-culture phenomenon the past few years. amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "markgraban";…
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I've met Jarvis Gray a few times at the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement conference (I still call it the "Society for Health Systems Conference"). SHS is a great organization to be a part of, by the way. Jarvis recently launched a…
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Please join us on May 16, as KaiNexus and I host a webinar presented by a leader from one of our customers -- Chad Westbrook from AGCO Corporation. Chad is a manufacturing engineering manager and AGCO Production System manager there. …
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I got onto the elevator in the lobby of our condo building one day last week. Our building's maintenance guy was already on there with a rolling cart of tools and supplies. I asked him to let me hop on with him and said, "Good morning." …
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Normally, my only beef with "Lean Six Sigma" books is when they state the falsehood of "Lean is for speed, and you need Six Sigma for quality." But, recently I've noticed that Amazon "bestsellers" in the same categories as my books seem…
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Lean focuses on making it easy for people to do the right thing. We also work hard to "error proof" processes and our work to make it difficult, if not impossible to do the wrong thing. The Throwback Thursday portion of this post looks…
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Here's an interesting column from Becker's Hospital Review, written by Michael Dowling, President and CEO, Northwell Health. I'm guessing he created the headline, since the phrase "give a damn" doesn't appear in the article: Michael…
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Yesterday's blog post was about a situation (with my podcast hosting service) that triggered memories of my time at General Motors in 1995. Today's post is about a recent article on Boeing that definitely caused me to think of that broken,…
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Ever since I started podcasting in 2006, I've been using a company called "Hipcast" to be the "hosting" company for the podcast audio files and feeds. For those of you not familiar with podcasting, that's the website where I upload podcast…
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Ryan and I are co-sponsoring a workshop that I'll be presenting on "Measures of Success" in Winnipeg on May 10. Learn more. Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients In Canada, we wait. A long time. …
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Mark's note: This post is reprinted from an email from Laura Batz Townsend, the CEO of the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation. I asked to share it here, on the tenth anniversary of Louise Batz's tragic death that was caused by a…
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I've owned the domain names LeanWhiskey.com and LeanWhisky.com for two years or so. That's not because I was going to get into the whiskey business like former Toyota guy David Meier. I like Lean. I like Whiskey. I'll figure out what to…
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Back in 2006, I wrote my first blog post about the unfortunate use of "assembly line" to mean "bad quality." The context there was healthcare people complaining about Lean as being a pathway to "assembly line medicine." Not all assembly…
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Thanks to Pablo Alvarez Flores, who posted this video on LinkedIn with an invitation for me to share my comments and reactions. There's a lot to dig into, but this post will focus on the theme of misunderstandings. I'm writing this…
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Joining me for Episode #340 of the podcast is Dr. Joy Furnival CEng MIET, an experienced senior NHS manager, improvement leader, and chartered engineer. I first crossed paths with Joy at a Lean healthcare event in England back in 2007. At…
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Reminder: Today and tomorrow are the last days to enter my giveaway contest where you can win signed copies of my books Measures of Success and Practicing Lean. Click here to enter. Here's the latest installment of "Key Tweets," a…
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