As I wrote about last month, I love newspapers, so I felt like I fit into the culture last week when I spent five days of my vacation in London, a city I really love. People in England seem to…
Today’s post is a throwback to an essay that I originally wrote for the excellent book Lean-Led Hospital Design: Creating the Efficient Hospital of the Future, where it appears in an appendix with some other contributed essays. You can listen to…
Thanks everybody for reading my blog here in 2015! It’s been a great year so far… 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…
My guest for episode #220 is somebody I’ve wanted to interview for a long time, Dr. Robert Wachter, one of the leading voices in the modern patient safety movement. He’s most recently author of a brand-new book The Digital Doctor:…
Is Lean management a “slow idea”? In this post, I reflect on why Lean and Kaizen often spread slowly in healthcare and organizations, drawing on insights from Atul Gawande’s essay on innovation. I just read Dr. Atul Gawande’s latest piece…
I always get annoyed when people spread the false dichotomy of “Lean is about efficiency and Six Sigma is for quality.” Replace the word “efficiency” with “speed” or “flow” and it’s still wrong. Here is an example of this falsehood…
Producer Clare Crawford-Mason shares behind-the-scenes stories of W. Edwards Deming and the 1980 NBC documentary If Japan Can Do It, Why Can’t We?–and reflects on Deming’s lasting impact on management, healthcare, and leadership. Listen: My guest for episode #167 is…
Preventable medical mistakes remain one of the most serious challenges in healthcare, yet many hospitals still struggle with learning from medical errors and preventing them from happening again. From emergency departments to pathology labs, the same types of errors continue…
I’m in Las Vegas, speaking today to close the Lean Healthcare PowerDay event. There are many great speakers, including Dr. Richard Shannon, Dr. David Munch, and my good friend and fellow author, Naida Grunden. Click on their names to listen…
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…
It’s my second post about the TV show Grey’s Anatomy, the first being “McDreamy” Fights the Blame Game on “Grey’s Anatomy.” Each post makes it less believable that I don’t watch the show religiously. Thanks go to my wife for…
Today, I’m sharing a brilliant Slate.com interview: “Risky Business: James Bagian “NASA astronaut turned patient safety expert” on Being Wrong.” He’s actually also an engineer and an anesthesiologist. An impressive background and impressive thinking. I will share a few highlights…