In recent years, healthcare has been learning a lot of lessons from aviation — including checklists and “Crew Resource Management,” as written about in the excellent books The Checklist Manifesto and Why Hospitals Should Fly. Aviation has gotten much…
Those who follow Lean healthcare know that Virginia Mason Medical Center, in Seattle, is one of the world’s leaders in improving care through Lean methods. They were featured last year on the CBS Evening News, for example. The LeanROI.org site,…
As I’m currently in Sweden, I was reminded of this video I found recently featuring John Black, a lean healthcare consultant and author who previously worked with Boeing and Gary Larson, a Vice President from Park Nicollet in Minneapolis (a…
Thanks to my friend Amber for telling me about Dr. Atul Gawande’s interview on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday. Regular readers of the blog will know I’m a huge fan of Gawande’s previous books Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect…
I don’t mean to kick Fritz Henderson while he’s down, after he resigned as CEO of Government Motors this week. He resigned on Tuesday and I didn’t even learn about it until Thursday, as I was under a proverbial rock,…
This episode is a discussion with Joan Wellman, of the consulting firm Joan Wellman & Associates. Joan is a real pioneer in the lean healthcare arena, having started her initial work with a hospital in 1995 — I haven’t found…
Again, I’m very happy to host the Carnival for John Hunter and his Curious Cat blog. My job here is to share some noteworthy and thought provoking posts from the past month. I hope you’ll discover a new blog or…
I’m sure anybody who has done any work with Lean has heard these words said in one form or another, often prefaced with a “You don’t understand…” We’re different. Diff’rent (it’s fun to spell that way, like the old show…
TL;DR: At GM, fear and poor leadership blocked bad news from flowing both up and down the organization. Executives were shielded from reality, frontline workers weren’t told the truth, and trust eroded as a result. Without leaders going to the…
Can Alan Mulally save Ford? – May. 11, 2009 Interesting story last month about Ford and CEO Alan Mulally. He’s a Toyota admirer and Lean devotee’ from his time at Boeing. FORTUNE magazine was allowed to share a diagram that…
Clarity Is Missing Link in Supply Chain – WSJ.com Ah, here we go, it’s time for the annual Just-In-Time-bashing article from the Wall Street Journal. Some past “the WSJ doesn’t get it” posts include: This WSJ Article (as do Many…
Airbus Aims to Pull Back Without Stalling – WSJ.com: This recent article about Airbus talks about facing a challenge of declining airplane orders. Airbus said Friday that it booked orders for just 16 planes in March, compared with 54 orders…
