Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #454 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Damon Baker. He is the founder and CEO of the firm Lean Focus. He’s also a Private Equity Partner…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #451 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Dr. Alan G. Robinson. He specializes in managing ideas, building high-performance organizations, creativity, innovation, quality, and lean production. He is the…
TL;DR: Kaizen isn’t a Japanese buzzword or a suggestion box–it’s a practical, scientific way for healthcare teams to solve problems, reduce frustration, and improve patient care every day, with leaders acting as coaches instead of gatekeepers. We’re coming up on…
Here is an interesting article that a few people pointed me toward the other day about the Seattle Mariners team: Mariners Sunday mailbag: Explaining the Japanese origin of the team’s new slogan “Manager Scott Servais does have a mantra each…
My guest for episode #321 of the podcast is Mark Hamel, He is a partner and COO with The Murli Group. Mark is a two-time recipient of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award for his books The Kaizen Event Fieldbook and his most recent book Lean Math, the reason we got together for this episode (although we talked about other things too).
I hope you enjoy the discussion, which is about people as much as it is about math.
Thanks to posting about the trip on LinkedIn, I learned that Mike Bukowski is now working for Sazerac, the parent company of Buffalo Trace, in a process improvement role. Last year, Mike attended the site visit and class that Joe Swartz and I hosted at Franciscan St. Francis Health.
Mike has embraced might call "lessons from Toyota," as taught to healthcare people, and is now training and coaching people who make some very fine bourbon, including Aaron Krentz, Processing Supervisor (at right).
I was recently asked to do a recorded video presentation for a medical conference in Turkey. I spoke about the dual pillars of "The Toyota Way":
Respect for People
Continuous Improvement
The video is about 20 minutes, split about half and half on each of those interrelated topics. I'm coming to you from a hotel room, somewhat tired after a day of consulting.
(Slides PDF and transcript also included)
Monday, I blogged about the sushi-making class I took on my last Sunday in Japan. Later that same Sunday, I did a walking food tour in the Shibuya area. Walking food tours are a great way to explore and learn about a city.
In our small group, there was a couple from Australia and a retired couple from South Africa.
Between stops on the tour, the South African gentleman, a retired mining company manager or executive, asked me why I was there in Japan for work.
I saw this headline the other day about University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas: “UMC finds savings through waste“ The headline really should say “through waste reduction.” Reducing waste is, of course, a good thing. Reducing waste usually saves money…
Joining me for Episode #285 is my friend and colleague, Karen Martin. She was previously a guest on Episode #151 where we discussed her book The Outstanding Organization and #190 we discussed her book Value Stream Mapping book. We'll be doing another podcast later this year about her next book, which is titled Clarity First: How Wise Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance.
Karen reached out with a provocative question that's easy to discuss, but hard to answer: "Is Lean Dead?" The reason she asked is that she's heard murmuring and read articles that ask "is it time for something new?" or if we're somehow in a "post-Lean" world.
One thing I like about Facebook is the way it reminds you about things that happened on this date in previous years. Facebook is reminding me these days about different milestones related to the publication of the book Healthcare Kaizen that…
I've produced A LOT of content about Kaizen and continuous improvement over the past 11 years, including podcasts and webinars. Somebody asked me to build a "curriculum" and a sequence of podcasts and webinars for people to watch as a way of getting educated about this approach. So this post is an attempt at that...
