Hat tip to Dan Markovitz for pointing out this excellent post on John Toussaint’s blog: “The Key Leadership Behaviors in a Lean Organization?” The post is a letter written by Paul O’Neill answering a question from a hospital leader. Paul…
What happens when a Fortune 500 CEO brings a long-term mindset and a bold commitment to safety into healthcare? In this conversation with Paul O’Neill, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and CEO of Alcoa, we explore how leadership, transparency, and aiming…
Many of you may know of Paul O’Neill for the dramatic employee safety improvements at aluminum maker Alcoa and you may know of him from his work in promoting healthcare improvement (he is the “bureaucrat” in “The Nun & the…
Op-Ed Contributor – Health Care’s Infectious Losses – NYTimes.com FINALLY, a major contribution to the discussion about how we need to improve the quality of care delivery. That’s how we are truly going to bring costs down – by improving…
As I mentioned the other day, I’ve helped the firm Value Capture launch a new podcast called “Habitual Excellence.” The first full episode has been released, with audio of a speech by the late Paul H. O’Neill, Sr. See this…
Paul Levy, the former CEO of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is a long time friend of mine and this blog (read his ongoing blog here although he’s no longer “Running a Hospital”). I’ve been meaning to blog about…
I'm often reminded of three challenging questions that are asked by Paul O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa and former US Treasury Secretary.
I've mentioned the questions before, in this blog post about Eric Ries and an employee's bill of rights. See more blog posts and my podcast with Mr. O'Neill.
Sadly, I'm reminded of the questions when I'm around people who cannot answer "yes" to them in healthcare workplaces. This is a widespread problem.
There's a lot to admire about Elon Musk. I admire his risk taking and his entrepreneurial spirit. I use PayPal a lot (one of his early companies) and I admire the innovation of Tesla and SpaceX. But, I question how much Musk and Tesla have been willing to learn from Toyota or people like Paul O'Neill.
Gary Peterson spent almost 40 years helping O.C. Tanner build a continuous improvement culture, work that earned the company the Shingo Prize in 1999. He joins me to talk about psychological safety, autonomy, leading change from the middle, and the…
Mike Stoecklein recalls a story secondhand. It was, he thinks, at one of the last four-day seminars W. Edwards Deming ever gave. Deming was frail by then. Someone later told Mike that when the seminar got to the Red Bead…
A Florida surgeon, Thomas Shaknovsky, was indicted on a second-degree manslaughter charge on April 13. The charge followed the death of William Bryan, a 70-year-old Alabama man, during what was supposed to be a laparoscopic splenectomy in August 2024. Instead…
I’m happy to announce that the first three chapters of my new book are now available through Leanpub.com. The book is called Psychological Safety for Lean Leaders: Make It Safe to Speak Up, So Improvement Can Actually Happen. It’s the…
