Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Why do we have to wake up patients to take vital signs every 4 hours if they are stable? Why does a patient need daily labs if there results have been stable for days? Because…
Joining me today for Episode #330 of the podcast is Christoph Roser, a professor of production management at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in Germany. He has decades of experience with Lean manufacturing including time with Toyota in Japan,…
tl;dr: Kaizen works in veterinary medicine because it focuses on small, low-risk improvements led by the people doing the work. Instead of fearing “bad ideas,” leaders should create systems that encourage experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement without blame. I was…
Mark’s note: Mike Sporer has commented a few times on blog posts and I invited him to write this guest post after we exchanged some emails about his recent experience as a hospital patient. I recently had a surgical procedure…
Last week, Herb Kelleher passed away. He was the legendary founder, CEO, and Chairman of Southwest Airlines. Southwest posted a nice tribute photo of him on the front of their website and also put up a special website HonoringHerb.org. Kelleher…
Today marks 25 years since W. Edwards Deming passed away in 1993. I remember sitting in a statistics class as an undergraduate at Northwestern University — it must have been January 1994. My professor said something about Dr. Deming’s passing and…
TL;DR:Process behavior charts help leaders compare hospitals (or any organizations) without overreacting to rankings or small differences. By separating signal from noise, they show when performance differences are meaningful — and when they are simply the predictable result of a…
I had a great time and learned so much as a guest of Honsha and their Executive Development Mission trip to Japan in October. The formal site visits to factories and companies were great, but a lot of the learning…
Skip Steward, the Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care in Tennessee, was a guest on Episode #314 of the podcast talking about TWI and Toyota Kata in healthcare (he was joined by Brandon Brown).
Today, I've asked Skip to come back and chat 1x1, in Episode #320, about his experience with Don Wheeler, learning from W. Edwards Deming, and more. I hope you enjoy his reflections, our discussions about healthcare, and connections to my book Measures of Success (Skip undoubtedly has a book in him too).
Today is a throwback to a throwback, in a way. Five years ago, I blogged about how the term "Lean Production" was 25 years old...
In the third and final part of this series, I share more about how Toyota teaches about TPS and TQM... and how they are sharing that approach with doctors and hospitals.
You might remember my blog post from May about the Shohei Ohtani, a Japanese player for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (that's not a very "lean" team name, is it").
I suggested that Norman Bodek contact baseball or sports writers at publications like ESPN or The Wall Street Journal. The Journal wrote about Ohtani and Harada last week:
How Shohei Ohtani Visualized His Baseball Success
The Japanese two-way sensation turned to a personal-growth technique called the Harada Method to help him achieve his goals