Lean Blog by Mark Graban | Lean Management and Healthcare
Practical insights from Mark Graban on Lean management and continuous improvement, leadership, psychological safety, healthcare, and manufacturing.
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What Toyota’s 1992 Booklet Leaves Out About Leadership
The 1992 Toyota booklet says surprisingly little about leadership. There’s a Kiichiro Toyoda quote about engineers getting their hands dirty. There’s a brief sentence about executives visiting the workplace and acting on what they see. That’s about it. For a…
The Taiichi Ohno 1981 Story Keeps Getting Reposted. It Can’t Be True.
It came across my LinkedIn feed again last week, and then a day later, a friend sent me the same thing from Instagram. Same story, a few words moved around, or copied word-for-word. If you spend any time in Lean…
Is Lean Just About Speed and Six Sigma About Quality? No — and Here’s Why
No. The claim that “Lean is for speed and Six Sigma is for quality” misrepresents both methodologies. Lean — based on the Toyota Production System — improves safety, quality, delivery, cost, and morale (SQDCM) together, with built-in quality (jidoka) as…
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: June 26, 2026
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
Why Lean Fails to Stick — with Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant
Why does Lean fail to stick so often? Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant join me on Episode 547 to make the case that the missing precondition is psychological safety, and that it has to exist at the top before any…
Even in Japan: A Target of Zero and a Process That Lives Near Seven Percent
The target printed on the chart was zero percent. The red line had never been near zero. Not in the nine months posted on the wall, and probably not in any month before them. It sat between 6.43% and 6.98%.…
‘No Debbie Downers’ and the Hidden Cost of a Positive Team
Picture your best week as a leader. Every meeting ran on time. Every status update was green. You walked the floor and people smiled and told you things were going great. Your open-door policy was working beautifully, because employees kept…
A Prize for Variation? What the NHS Backlog Leaderboard Actually Rewards
TL;DR: The NHS backlog gets narrated one month at a time, and millions in bonus money ride on the moves. A Process Behavior Chart shows most movement is noise — and the trusts that stay on top are running structurally…
When a Lean Leader Admits He Doesn’t Know What He’s Doing, with Gary Peterson
Gary Peterson spent almost 40 years helping O.C. Tanner build a continuous improvement culture, work that earned the company the Shingo Prize in 1999. He joins me to talk about psychological safety, autonomy, leading change from the middle, and the…
When Behavioral Nudges Help Patients, and When They Cover for a Broken Process
TL;DR: Behavioral nudges can produce real gains in patient experience at almost no cost. They can also be used to dress up a process that should have been fixed. The discipline for CI leaders is knowing the difference and getting…
What Toyota’s 1992 Booklet Says About Stopping the Line, and What It Leaves to You
Picking up the thread from the previous post on Toyota’s April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” This one’s about the line-stop rope or andon cord. The booklet describes the mechanism with care. From the jidoka section: “The ‘fixed-position stop…