Mark Graban’s newer Lean Blog Audio podcast series with “audiobook” style readings of selected blog posts. Learn how to subscribe.
Elon Musk tweeted this yesterday: “Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.” I host a podcast (and am writing a book) about learning from mistakes…
“Simply put, we cannot get to zero harm without psychological safety.” I wrote that as part of this page on the Value Capture website: Psychological Safety and Its Essential Link to Continuous Improvement I’ve come to understand that psychological safety is a…
A contractor unplugged my WiFi router. Or was there more to it than that? Instead of blaming somebody else, what mistakes did I make that led to the Q&A section of my webinar being knocked offline? Yesterday, I presented a…
tl;dr: The WSJ usually oversimplifies Lean, but this GE/Larry Culp article offers a surprisingly accurate look at flow, kaizen, and the culture behind real continuous improvement. It’s one of the few mainstream pieces that captures Lean as a leadership system–not…
I’m really excited to be hosting and moderating this webinar next week, the second in our new Value Capture Webinar series. The title is “Applications of Lean Leadership Methods in Home-Based Care.” It’s being presented by Cooper Linton, Associate Vice-President,…
TL;DR: Dolphins gaming rewards illustrate a core Lean lesson: behavior follows system design. In organizations, quotas and incentives combined with fear lead to gaming the numbers–not real improvement. Leaders must fix systems, not blame people. Oh, how I enjoyed this…
I received a question from a healthcare leader who had read about the “idea card” format and method that Joe Swartz and I shared in our Healthcare Kaizen books. I read your post about the Idea Card. Amazing! Have a…
TL;DR: Improving vaccination isn’t just about heroic effort or speed–it requires both small Kaizen ideas from the front line and thoughtful process redesign that improves flow, safety, and scalability. In this era of Covid–19 vaccination, I’m still pretty much sidelined…
tl;dr summary: Lean isn’t just efficiency… it’s safety, quality, delivery, cost, and morale. People often misunderstand that — they don’t know or they were taught the wrong things I often have the opportunity to teach a group of experienced healthcare…
In this post: Today, I’m going to share some reflections from one of my workplaces, some things that occurred last week. I’m going to be vague, so forgive me for that. It feels right to be less specific in this…
I’m not a Buffalo Bills fan (a.k.a. “The Bills Mafia”), but I did attend one game at what was then called Rich Stadium in 1998 when I was a grad school intern at Kodak. Even without being a fan, I…
TL;DR: Blaming “human error” is where root cause analysis goes to die. Keep asking why — the system made the error possible, and the system is what leaders can fix. When Covid vaccines first rolled out, the pressure to avoid…
