It’s a project that my co-author, Joe Swartz, and I have been working on all year… the manuscript is finally complete and sent (as a big batch!) to our publisher. I’m talking about our upcoming book, “Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line…
Bob Lutz spent 47 years in the auto industry at GM, Ford, BMW, and Chrysler, and in this 2011 conversation he talks about his book Car Guys vs. Bean Counters, the “blanderizer” effect on product design, and why he thinks…
As someone who started his career in the auto industry, I’m excited to be interviewing a modern auto-industry legend on Friday for an upcoming podcast — Bob Lutz, the retired former Vice Chairman of General Motors. We’ll be talking about…
Last week, I posted a podcast with Mike George, founder of Strong America Now, an organization that is promoting Lean and Six Sigma methods to our political leaders and government. Much of the discussion, maybe unfortunately, was focused on Mr.…
One of the variations of my acronym L.A.M.E. is “Lean As Misguidedly Explained,” and I recently ran across two fresh instances of this (and, for once, neither is from the Wall Street Journal!). One example is a news writer who…
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…
If you are a Twitter user and follow the #Lean hashtag on Twitter, you might have seen a lot of noise from a company called Designing Kaizen (@DesigningKaizen), claiming to have a web-based app for “value stream mapping” (see their…
On June 30, the PBS NewsHour program did a 7-minute story on healthcare improvement (featuring Lean and Toyota methods) at Denver Health. You can also see the video or read the transcript on the NewsHour site: “Denver Hospital Sets the…
Today’s episode is a chat with Jody Crane, MD, MBA and Chuck Noon, PhD. They are talking about their outstanding book The Definitive Guide to Emergency Department Operational Improvement: Employing Lean Principles with Current ED Best Practices to Create the…
There was an interesting article in the most recent Inc. Magazine called “Domestic Medical Tourism: How one company is saving businesses big bucks on employee medical treatments.” Much of the talk about “medical tourism” has focused on patients flying halfway…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is from Dr. Mark Jaben. I first met Mark in person at Cindy Jimmerson’s Lean Healthcare West conference in Montana last year. I’m happy to publish this new guest post to follow up his previous…
This one got stuck in the “stuff to blog about” pile for a few months, but HBR published a gem of an article called “How To Stop the Blame Game.” Dr. Deming always talked about how destructive blame could be,…
