Mark Graban’s newer Lean Blog Audio podcast series with “audiobook” style readings of selected blog posts. Learn how to subscribe.
TL;DR Larry Culp, CEO of GE Aerospace, shows that Lean leadership isn’t about tools or slogans–it’s about daily behaviors. By grounding Lean in safety, respect for people, and continuous improvement, Culp practices kaizen at every level, including his own role…
TL;DR: If Lean improvements put jobs at risk, people will stop improving. Organizations that commit to “no layoffs due to Lean” create trust, unlock ideas, and sustain better performance. When I worked with Johnson & Johnson’s ValuMetrix Services consulting group…
tl;dr: Halloween might be about ghosts, zombies, and monsters — but those same creatures sometimes show up in our organizations all year long. They lurk in old processes, mindless routines, and fear-based management habits. Here’s how to spot the spooky…
In Lean circles, we talk a lot about leadership commitment. But it’s not every day that a CEO puts their hair on the line to show it. As we wrote about in Healthcare Kaizen, at IU Health Goshen Hospital, the…
TL;DR Leader Standard Work isn’t a calendar or a checklist. It’s the daily responsibility of leaders to show up with the right behaviors–listening, asking, following up, and creating psychological safety. How leaders act in everyday moments matters far more than…
TL;DR: This look back at Allina Health shows how continuous improvement at the bedside actually works: frontline staff identifying real problems, leaders acting as coaches, and Kaizen routines supported by psychological safety. The result wasn’t abstract “culture change,” but measurable…
Lessons from my book The Mistakes That Make Us, plus conversations with Phillip Cantrell and Damon Lembi One of the central themes in my book, The Mistakes That Make Us, is the shift leaders must make from needing to be right to being willing…
TL;DR: PDCA is meant to be a learning cycle, but in fear-based cultures it becomes PDCYA–Plan, Do, Cover Your A**. When leaders punish mistakes, people stop learning and start protecting themselves. Psychological safety turns PDCA back into real improvement. Lean…
TL;DR: A USPS clerk tapping the green smiley face on a customer feedback screen is a small but telling example of gaming the system. When performance metrics are vague, fear-based, or tied to rewards and punishment, people naturally optimize for…
TL;DR: Fred Noe of Jim Beam offers powerful leadership lessons on learning from mistakes, small-batch experimentation, and long-term thinking. His approach shows how psychological safety, humility, and starting small enable innovation that scales–whether you’re leading a distillery, a hospital, or…
“I wish moments like this didn’t seem so noteworthy. I wish focusing on safety and thanking people for speaking up was the norm in hospitals around the world.”— my comment on LinkedIn That was my response to a short yet…
Every few years–or let’s be honest, quite often on social media–we see a statistic making the rounds: “70% of Lean initiatives fail.” It’s usually presented as an indictment of the methodology. And quite often, the person sharing it seems to…
