Listen Today’s guest is my friend John Ervin and we were able to sit down together here in San Antonio to record this episode. John has about 20 years of healthcare leadership experience, including in military medicine and the civilian sector.…
Announcement: Dr. Greg Jacobson and I are doing a new webinar for KaiNexus on “More Leadership Behaviors That Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement‘” on January 27. It’s free… learn more and register here. * * * * * *…
Thankfully, it has been a while since I’ve had to post something about technical difficulties here on the blog. Thanks to my reader survey, two people pointed out that they were having trouble opening the daily or weekly automated emails…
Thanks to everybody for reading my blog in 2014! As always, I appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to read and participate in the discussion and I hope you’ll continue visiting the site in 2015… the tenth anniversary…
I travel a lot and, thanks to my work, I’m pretty well attuned to the idea of not blaming individuals for systemic problems in an organization. Or, at least I try to be good about this. I’m human, so I…
The ideas, principles, and methods that we’d recognize as “Lean” aren’t exclusively of Japanese origin. Many of us, myself included, draw inspiration from Toyota, reading books about them and visiting their factories. For me, I’ve had a chance to visit…
This tweet and photo made me chuckle the other day… If it’s “your right” or “your left” as you’re going up or down the stairs, collisions are going to happen if everybody followed these instructions: In Japan, during our…
There have been plenty of headlines and updates since I first blogged about the controversy over Lean healthcare in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan (see my previous posts here). From my outside perspective, there are some good things happening. I…
In November 2012, I had the opportunity to visit Japan for the first time as part of a Lean healthcare study mission. It was fascinating to compare notes with colleagues from the U.S., Belgium, and Holland as we visited factories,…
This week starts the celebration of International Nurses Week, which leads up to Nurses Day on May 12, which is the birthday of the legendary Florence Nightingale. Hug a nurse today. Or do whatever you can to help. Nurses are…
Following up on yesterday’s post that talked about “the old GM” putting cost ahead of quality, I sometimes get flashbacks to my days working for General Motors. I once slammed a greasy connecting rod down on my manager’s desk at GM.…
What Henry Ford wrote about hospitals in 1922 sounds surprisingly modern. He argued for reducing nurses’ wasted motion, designing around patients, standardizing rooms, challenging professional hierarchy, and treating every process as experimental. More than a century later, many of those…