Mark Graban’s newer Lean Blog Audio podcast series with “audiobook” style readings of selected blog posts. Learn how to subscribe.
Thanks to GoLeanSixSigma.com for asking me some questions for a discussion that they've posted on their website. On the pet peeves issue, I tried to address, in particular, some of the "Lean Sigma" stuff that I have blogged about here on this site...
I get worked up about labeling a troubled surgical department as "a factory," but there are far more important issues of patient safety and hospital culture to be discussed related to a Seattle Times investigative piece.
Art Byrne's latest book, The Lean Turnaround Action Guide, has a lot of great tips that he's trying to share, CEO to CEO. How many CEOs are reading this book and heeding his advice, in manufacturing or in healthcare?
Why did "The Rock" and his movie make me think about Lean? Are many individuals (or organization's) willing to put time into continuous improvement every day for 20 years? If so, the results and "after" picture seem astonishing, right?
Registration is now open for our “Kaizen Live!” event, where you can visit Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis to see what a “culture of continuous improvement” is like in a way that will help you in creating the same for your organization.
I continue sharing documents from the Don Ephlin library archive. What did Ford and the UAW learn when they visited Japan in 1981? Many of the things that made Japanese industry successful are the same things that make organizations successful with Lean today, including in healthcare.
Today's post points to my guest blog post for the W. Edwards Deming Institute: Reflections on Dr. Deming's Hospital Notes - What Has Changed Since 1990? Why do the same problems that Dr. Deming experienced as a patient 30 years ago still happen so often today?
Are there parallels between medicine and organizations when we look at the tension between heroism and the sometimes boring work of preventing problems and improving things? I comment on an article by Dr. Atul Gawande…
Lean sometimes gets, I think, an unfair rap that it’s only a method for incremental improvement. See this article, for example: “Limits of Lean — Transformative Care Redesign Must Go Beyond Typical Lean-Based Improvements.”
I saw this article a few days ago in one of the larger healthcare industry trade publications: How One Woman Saved IU Health $54 Million The headline is misleading, as addressed in the opening sentence / sub-headline of the story (via HealthLeaders): “With a little help from about 10,000 of her friends and colleagues, the head
When I talk to organizations about Kaizen, or continuous improvement, there's far too much self-defeating talk, where people say things like: "We're not going to try this Kaizen process because our culture isn't ready yet."
Yesterday, the W. Edwards Deming Institute published the second in my series of three posts for them: "The Failure of "The Livonia Philosophy" at my GM Plant." Read more...
