All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
WSJ Article: Faltering Family M.D.s Get Technology Lifeline While I was skeptical of Intel’s planned tablet PC for nurses, I’m much more positive in my first reaction to this WSJ article about small (or single MD) physician practices using technology…
I was sent a nice “gemba report” essay from a UK lean healthcare consultant, Andrew Castle. Andrew consults for the UK National Health Service and came with a group to tour two American sites: Toyota Industrial Equipment (forktruck manufacturing in…
For some context, here are my complaints about UPS ads from earlier today and from last year. Thanks to the “create your own whiteboard” feature on the UPS website, I created this Lean Message. Check it out: Click this link…
tl;dr: The andon cord isn’t a tool–it’s a trust signal. Toyota’s thousands of line stops reflect psychological safety and leadership support. Ford’s rare pulls reflected fear and mistrust. Lean succeeds or fails on culture, not mechanics. In 2007, a BBC…
The UPS Whiteboard. What Can Brown Do For You? These “whiteboard” ads with the guy with the long hair (Mark Fields would be proud!) drawing out logistics concepts on a whiteboard are pretty ubiquitous, especially during news shows and sporting…
Mullet or not, Fields’ hair is talk of the auto industry Mullet-wearing Ford exec plans to keep it I know it’s juvenile of me to point out the Mark Fields hockey hair and I was good about not mentioning it…
I recently posted some Lean Q&A. These questions came from an Industry Week webcast that I did with sponsor Infor, and there were plenty more questions than time to answer. Here’s the next installment of questions that I received. If…
I got an email last week, from Dan, a long-time Ford employee who took a buyout and is now working on a college degree. He’s looking for a company (local to him in Sterling Heights, MI) where he can do…
Why Toyota Is Afraid Of Being Number One In this Business Week piece about Toyota’s fear of a backlash against them, with their continued success, there was this tidbit I found interesting: “That same year [as NUMMI opened], a Ron…
Intel, Motion Develop Tablet PC for Nurses – WSJ.com More news stories via Google. Is this a “siren song” of technology for healthcare? Executives and managers in any industry, it seems, believe in the promise of technology as the solution…
Got a question yesterday from Eric Christiansen, my guest for episode #18 of the LeanBlog Podcast. He asked: Can a company be considered a lean company if it does not use some method of statistical process control? I toured a…
Back to my original post about gaming the system, there are three ways people can respond to pressure to improve: I got an email from an old friend — I’ll keep his name, company, and industry confidential, but he said…
