I’m in beautiful Traverse City, Michigan for a few days for the Michigan Lean Consortium annual conference. It’s my home state, so it’s great to see the collaboration around lean healthcare and lean, more generally. Michigan, along with other industrial…
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.…
It’s nowhere near as important as yesterday’s topic of employee and patient safety, but my last two days of using the new Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” operating system made me think of some classic change management challenges that might…
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…
Today, I’m announcing an evolution of my work life: doing less with the Lean Enterprise Institute, doing more consulting and speaking, and starting to help build an exciting startup company, KaiNexus. The first 16 years of my career has been…
Yesterday, we lost a great guru in the process and business improvement worlds, Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who passed away at the age of 64. Goldratt is the author of many books including The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. I’m…
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…
Are We 84.7% Certain We’re in the 90th Percentile? Of course, hospitals should focus on patient satisfaction. That’s important but is often a vague and uncertain thing to measure. But, as Dr. Deming said: “The most important figures that one…
When hospital people say they don’t want to be a factory or “we don’t want assembly-line medicine,” the statement often goes unchallenged. What is the statement or the anxiety behind such a statement? I sometimes challenge in a friendly way…
You might have read my blog post from last week about an unsafe taxi driver and medical errors – Said the Unsafe Taxi Driver, “Well, Did I Hit Anybody?” In a colossal coincidence, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd…
TL;DR: Samuel Culbert argues that performance reviews are subjective, political, and harmful to results. Instead of judging people once a year, leaders should coach continuously and take responsibility for system performance. Episode #117 is a conversation with Prof. Samuel A.…
Lean is not a “command and control” leadership and management model. The old command-and-control dynamic leads to so much poor quality and misery in all sorts of industries and organizations – including factories and hospitals. In a command and control…