I heard a great line from an Emergency Department doc and physician leader yesterday. Talking about his hospital’s Lean efforts, he said, simply: “Data should create light, not heat.” Brilliant. Simply brilliant. What he meant was that data should be…
Note: I edited the post title on April 3 to make it clear this was an April Fool’s Joke. Comments posted by readers on 4/1 and 4/2 may have been “fooled” – thanks for taking the joke in good spirits.…
TL;DR: Data is what gets recorded. Facts are what’s actually happening. Confusing the two is how leaders get fooled by faked reports, broken sensors, and decorated dashboards. Deming and Ohno both warned about this in different ways. The fix is…
While in Boston, I’m getting the chance to sit in on some sessions of an MIT Seminar in Healthcare Systems Innovation. Today, the session that focused a lot of Lean as a means to improve quality and cost. Lean is…
I had an interesting encounter at the Kendall Square Au Bon Pain yesterday morning. Not a bad customer experience, but something I noticed in the checkout process that might be worth discussing. I had a bagel sandwich (wasbai salmon on…
I recently invited questions for Michael Balle, the author of the Shingo Prize winning book The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround. He has a new book (published by LEI, my employer), recently published, called “The Lean Manager.” Here…
Yesterday’s WSJ front page headline caught my eye, as a frequent Starbucks customer and obvious Lean zealot: Latest Starbucks Buzzword: ‘Lean’ Japanese Techniques The headline is full bodied and complex brew that gives us a lot to chew on before…
Today’s blog post will be just a bunch of random thoughts. For one, I just got back from London last night after a whirlwind Lean healthcare tour. I visited five hospitals between London and the south of England in three…
The Ice Cream Maker: An Inspiring Tale About Making Quality The Key Ingredient in Everything You Do I was reading the WSJ a while back and was intrigued by a book recommendation by Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli (you can read that…
The Open Secret of Success: Financial Page: The New Yorker I’m not normally a reader of The New Yorker, but I thank Norman Bodek for pointing this out as we recorded a new podcast episode (to be released in a…
The OODA Loop & You I love examples of lean thinking that come from unexpected angles. Mike Gardner at the TPM Log recently brought up one of my favorite figures from the world of folks who embody lean without knowing…
Click here for Part 1 and Part 2 of the series of posts about my visit to Dr. Sami Bahri, the “World’s First Lean Dentist.” In Part 2, I talked about how the Lean “tool heads” might be disappointed, and…
