I was recently asked to do a recorded video presentation for a medical conference in Turkey. I spoke about the dual pillars of "The Toyota Way":
Respect for People
Continuous Improvement
The video is about 20 minutes, split about half and half on each of those interrelated topics. I'm coming to you from a hotel room, somewhat tired after a day of consulting.
(Slides PDF and transcript also included)
In some of the major Lean transformation stories (in manufacturing in healthcare) usually include stories about some percentage of managers, doctors, or employees who chose to leave the organization. This is often a badge of honor of sorts. Sometimes, those people get labeled as "concrete heads" (I term I think we shouldn't use, as I've blogged about).
Is this really the right way to view things?
Lean can be very fragile. History shows that Lean can fall apart even in an organization that is years into a "Lean journey" with strong CEO involvement.
How is this possible? If often happens when a new CEO is brought in from the outside. In the case of the manufacturing company, Wiremold, it happened when they were acquired by a French company, Legrand.
As an aside, the team that coined the term "Lean" almost used the term "fragile," as I blogged about here.
Back in 2007, Bob Emiliani joined me for Episode #30 of the podcast. As we revisit the podcast and the new transcript I had made, what are the lessons for manufacturers or hospitals?
What's the risk that's created when new leadership takes over?
I do my best to practice what I preach. I'm not perfect, by any means, but I'm pretty good about practicing the "Kaizen" style of continuous improvement. In this post, I share three recent examples of my Kaizen efforts for LeanBlog.org, JapanLeanTrip.com, and LeanHospitalsBook.com.
Here are a few "quick hits" - similar to my "clearing the backlog" posts, quick quotes and links to articles you might find interesting. Unlike the "backlog," some of these stories I'm linking to are relatively fresh.
Cleaning out the backlog of stuff I wanted to blog about...
Not Being Lean Lemmings; Why Best Practices Don't Yokoten; Nissan Leaders Lead the Way, After the Problems
Previous Episodes (Full List): Click to visually browse episodes For easy access to any Podcast, use the forwarding URL: leanblog.org/X where X is the episode number. This text list is from the old version of the podcast’s main blog page.…
In this post, I share links and information about two upcoming free webinars that I'm hosting this month, some 2018 workshops I'm doing again on better managing metrics, next year's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, and some online education about "Healthcare Kaizen" that I have opened up for public registration. Please check out all of the links, resources, and information...
As you might know from episode #290 of my podcast with Eric Ries on Monday, his new book was released on Tuesday: The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth. I think there are…
This Business Insider article caught my eye the other day: A celebrity chef who owns 26 restaurants explains why he loves when employees shoot down his ideas I’ve eaten at a José Andrés tapas restaurant in Las Vegas before. So I…
My guest for Episode #286 is Dean Gruner, MD, the recently retired CEO of ThedaCare, a health system in Wisconsin that has long been considered a worldwide leader in the practice of Lean in healthcare. See this article about his retirement, where he says "I've gotten more than I've given."
Dean was previously my guest in Episodes 119 and 144 and I'm thrilled that he took time out of his retirement to talk with me about his lessons learned as he looks back on how ThedaCare's Lean journey has evolved, including some things he would consider to be missteps and challenges that they used as a springboard to get even better.
I will also be releasing a separate episode where Dean talks about their experiences with Accountable Care Organizations (our topic from #144) and other "big picture" healthcare issues of the day.
I'm including a full transcript along with a three-page PDF summary, as I've been doing recently.
Another in the series of "do words matter?" posts... do phrases like "Lean Transformation" resonate as much as "Business Transformation?"
