In this 2015 conversation, John Dyer reflects on his career at General Electric — including attending Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s four-day seminar and a smaller follow-on course — and what happened when he took Deming’s 14 Points back to GE…
Back in 2011, I asked for and received some great input from readers about updating a chapter for the second edition of my book Lean Hospitals on “A Vision for Lean Hospitals.” A lot has changed in the healthcare environment over four…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is by Rodrigo Bernal, with the first post on this site contributed from Mexico. Rodrigo uses a lunch outing to raise important questions about customer focus and the voice of the customer. If there is a…
In healthcare, it’s a well-known problem that people often don’t speak up to point out risks or to report near misses. It’s an organizational culture problem… people are afraid of being blamed, punished, or retaliated against for speaking up. A…
I’ve gone to Japan twice now with Kaizen Institute to study Lean with healthcare professionals from around the world. I first went in 2012, as a paid attendee, and I went back in 2014 as a partner and co-facilitator to…
TL;DR: A re-aired episode of This American Life on NUMMI highlights enduring lessons about leadership, learning, and Lean. While critics like Labor Notes frame Lean as “management by stress,” my experience inside GM–and later in healthcare–points to management systems, not…
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…
My wife and I were in Boston over the weekend, as it was her fifth reunion from her MIT master’s program. I’m also an alum, but was considered a “guest” since I graduated 16 years ago from my program and…
It’s been just about 18 years since I was leaving GM to start the master’s program at MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing program (now called Leaders for Global Operations). Here’s a 1992 interview that describes the origins of the program. It…
I’ve been a big fan of Dr. Atul Gawande’s writing for a long time (see previous posts about him and his work). His latest article is out, which I was able to read last night. It just came out (or…
To the left is a young baby me. I don’t think I was thinking about Dr. Deming as a baby, but thankfully my parents had a lot of intrinsic motivation to take care of me! One of the many things…