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,…
Episode #118 is a follow-up to podcast #116 with Jim Womack, founder and former Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, now their Senior Advisor and author of the new book Gemba Walks, available in paperback, Kindle format, iBooks, and other…
On Friday, there was yet another Wall Street Journal article about Lean (fixating as they always do on the “Just In Time” component). The article titled “For Lean Factories, No Buffer” yet again takes an outdated 1980s view that Lean…
When an organization sets a target for the number of kaizen ideas employees should submit, it usually gets exactly what it asked for — a number. What it doesn’t get is genuine improvement. The ideas come in to hit the…