This week, Joe Swartz (pictured at left) and I are running a “Kaizen Live” workshop at his main hospital, Franciscan St. Francis Health. Today and tomorrow, we’re running a 1.5-day workshop where attendees will get to visit departments and hear…
My guest for podcast episode #223 is Christian Wolcott, a senior advisor and director of Kaizen Institute North America and their director for Japan tours. Christian was an integral part of the team for the Japan Lean Healthcare Tour that…
I’ve been overdue in writing more posts about our Japan tour that took place two months ago now. See previous posts in this series. I’m going to try to do one post a week on this topic. It’s always fascinating…
A friend sent me a link to this article, “7 cultural concepts we don’t have in the U.S.,” and he told me to check out item #5 in the list – Kaizen in Japan. By the way, if you ever…
The ideas, principles, and methods that we’d recognize as “Lean” aren’t exclusively of Japanese origin. Many of us, myself included, draw inspiration from Toyota, reading books about them and visiting their factories. For me, I’ve had a chance to visit…
I’ll be blogging a lot more about my recent trip to Japan with Kaizen Institute, including the site visits and our lessons learned. I had a few days of tourist / vacation time in Tokyo before and after the trip,…
Last week, I had the opportunity to spend a day with my Healthcare Kaizen co-author Joe Swartz and his colleagues at one of the three hospitals in the Franciscan St. Francis Health system. It was my second visit and, like…
People often say Lean is pretty simple (or that it’s just “common sense“). Yeah, some of the concepts are simple… but sometimes deceptively so. Or, we find that it’s easier to describe Lean (as a management system, a set of…
Today’s post is being hosted by the Lean Enterprise Institute and their “Lean Post” blog… click on the headline below or the image to read: “Standardization is a Countermeasure, Never the Goal“ It’s a post that encourages people to “ask…
Last night, my co-author Joe Swartz and I were able to formally receive the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award for our book Healthcare Kaizen. We learned about this recognition about a year ago and received the formal recognition last night, including a very…
Out there in the Lean and quality improvement communities, you sometimes hear some silly things. Sometimes, I want to attach the “Lean As Mistakenly Explained” (or L.A.M.E.) label to what’s said when it really seems off the mark from what…
It has been right about three years since I was introduced to Dr. Greg Jacobson via a reader of this blog. It was great to meet a physician who had read, loved, and practiced the ideas from Masaaki Imai’s book Kaizen.…
