Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Paul O’Neill was a pioneer in establishing an all-encompassing pursuit of safety and zero harm as the path to excellence and profitability at Alcoa, and then…
As organizations like UMass Memorial Health surpass hundreds of thousands–and even millions of kaizens, it’s worth pausing to reflect on what those numbers really mean for culture, leadership, and improvement. Toyota famously documented millions of employee suggestions over decades. More…
I realize there’s a lot of serious stuff going on in the world… and that’s weighing on my mind a ton, which is one reason I haven’t been blogging quite as much recently. But, if you’ll forgive the indulgence, I’m…
tl;dr: We often label small changes as “Just Do Its,” but that can skip over useful thinking. Even the simplest Kaizen can follow a quick PDSA cycle–Plan, Do, Study, Adjust–to ensure we’re learning and improving, not just acting. Maybe it’s…
Be honest, would you have seen the intentional typo in the post title if I hadn’t put it on quotation marks? It’s still not easy to see, is it? Proofreading is difficult and it’s impossible for even the skilled, dedicated…
tl;dr: Even with professional editors, designers, and multiple reviews, defects still happen in books–and some inevitably escape to readers. This post uses Lean concepts like defects and escapes to reflect on humility, learning, and system improvement in self-publishing, reminding us…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Ontario is betting big on an untested hypothesis of reorganizing and consolidating healthcare operations and budgets predicting it will result in patients “seamlessly” moving through the health system. Time will tell, but the history has…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Why do we have to wake up patients to take vital signs every 4 hours if they are stable? Why does a patient need daily labs if there results have been stable for days? Because…
My guest for Episode #327 of the podcast is Marc Rouppe van der Voort, Ph.D., who is joining me from Utrecht in the Netherlands. We first met back in 2009 when he invited me to come speak at a Dutch…
Joining me for Episode #307 of the podcast is my friend Andre DeMerchant, the President of DeMerchant Healthcare Solutions Inc., based in Kitchener, Ontario. We first crossed paths when we had the chance to work together with an American healthcare client via our then-affiliation with Pascal Dennis and Lean Pathways.
In today's episode, we talk about Andre's history working for Toyota in Canada and what he learned there -- and why it's important that he learned about "how flow works" at Toyota. We chat about the terms "Lean" and "The Toyota Production System" and what those words mean to him. How does TPS "transcend culture and language," as well as industries?
We then shift to talking about healthcare and some of the common challenges, including "financial hardships," that are faced in many countries. Why are hospitals "poorly prepared for change" in many cases? Another main theme is "cost cutting" and why you can't cut your way to success.
Previous Episodes (Full List): Click to visually browse episodes For easy access to any Podcast, use the forwarding URL: leanblog.org/X where X is the episode number. This text list is from the old version of the podcast’s main blog page.…
TL;DR: Quality posters and slogans don’t improve performance–they signal that management expects people to “try harder” instead of fixing broken systems. As Deming taught, most quality problems come from management-controlled systems, not worker effort. Remove the posters. Substitute leadership. Back…
