It’s once again my pleasure to host the Carnival for John Hunter and his Curious Cat blog. There are many excellent and thought provoking posts from the past month. I hope you’ll discover a new blog or two (or new…
Lean Leap to Health Care #4 (click for Part #3) by Scott McDuffee “Hey Coach Mike, what have you been up to?” I had been sitting at my “second office,” which will remain nameless, though their symbol is an American…
If Lean can work in healthcare, why not software? Today’s guest post is by Eric Landes, who currently works with Lean/Agile techniques in project portfolio management and development environments in an enterprise IT setting. He constantly works to add business…
Why ‘Quality’ Care Is Dangerous – WSJ.com Yesterday’s WSJ opinion piece by Dr. Jerome Goopman (author of How Doctors Think) and Pamela Hartzband caught my eye. Thanks to the four or five of you who also emailed me the link…
As a frequent flyer, I really try to turn off the process thinking part of my brain, for sanity’s sake. However, one thing that constantly amazes me is the failure of American Airlines to effectively manage the boarding process and…
Following up on these two earlier posts (here and here)… I’ll quit calling them the “Idiot Corporation of America” since the Peanut Corporation of America is bankrupt and shutting down. I feel bad for those who are losing jobs due…
Hospitals See Benefits of Lean and Six Sigma Regular readers know I often write about what I termed “L.A.M.E.” — Lean as Misguidedly Executed. The ASQ (American Society for Quality) survey that I linked to at the top probably just…
TheDay.com – Food safety problems slip by auditors You might remember my rants about the Idiot Corp… I mean Peanut Corporation of America. Just saw now in the news that they had an “inspection” that, upon closer inspection, is either…
Hello from Connecticut…. it’s always fascinating to me to see the spread of Lean healthcare around the world. When I attended the Lean Enterprise Institute global summit on Lean Healthcare in the UK in 2007, they had attendees from 20…
Taking the Wheel as Toyota Skids – NYTimes.com Toyota’s Cost Cutting Plan to Include Buyouts for Factory Workers Toyota famously has avoided layoffs of permanent employees since 1950 and they’ve also taken extraordinary measures to avoid them in recent downtimes.…
Business list mixes Covey with Seuss – JSOnline There’s a new book I saw at the airport the other day, a compilation of short summaries of the “Best 100” business books of all time: The 100 Best Business Books of…
Why Incentives Are Effective, Irresistible, and Almost Certain to Backfire | Fast Company Just about when I start thinking “Is Fast Company magazine relevant anymore, should I renew my subscription?”, a gem like this appears. It’s a very old lesson,…