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GE Gets a Lean CEO, From the Outside: Larry Culp

Jet lag, even well managed and planned for, meant I was awake early on a Sunday morning. Over breakfast, I read more about news from last week, that GE had fired their CEO John Flannery after 14 months and replaced him with a relatively new board member, Larry Culp.

Culp is GE's first outsider CEO hire in their 100+ year history. So who is this guy and why did they hire him?

Culp was CEO of Danaher, a company that's quite often held up as the best non-Toyota Lean company out there. And they're an American company. Danaher, through its Danaher Business System (DBS) approach, uses Lean as a business strategy in a way that's very different than Toyota. Danaher has acquired companies and brought DBS and Lean in as a way to turn around and improve those businesses.

Kaizen at Garrison Brothers: Improving the Bourbon Bottle Dipping Process

I'm excited that our sold-out "Symposium on Learning Organizations" group will be visiting Toyota's San Antonio plant on Wednesday. Later that day, we'll be touring the Garrison Brothers Distillery and, on Thursday, we are using their "barrel barn" as a venue for "Open Space" discussions, the Red Bead Experiment, and more. We have a group of 40 from many industries attending and we might run a similar event in a different location in the future.

I've blogged about Garrison Brothers and my stint as a bottling line volunteer before...

In that post, I shared pictures of me working to dip bottles of bourbon into a sealing wax. I was wearing a winter coat because it was February in Texas and there was a bit of snow and ice that week.

When I was back there recently, I saw some additional improvements that seem like "Kaizen" to me. 

Hear Jeff Hunter’s Thoughts on “Putting Strategy Back Into Strategy Deployment”

Today's post is the transcript of a discussion that I recently recorded with Jeff Hunter, the author of the book Patient-Centered Strategy: A Learning System for Better Care.

Jeff is presenting a free webinar that KaiNexus and I are hosting on September 24:

Putting Strategy Back in Strategy Deployment
Below, you can listen to our chat where Jeff introduces himself and some of the concepts that he'll be presenting about. The transcript follows the audio player.

Operational Excellence Mixtape: September 14, 2018

Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient The legendary quality leader W. Edwards Deming is widely known for his thoughts on statistics and systems.  However, Deming believed that psychology was of crucial importance when improving organizational performance.  The Institute for Improvement in Healthcare shares…

How Toyota Uses TQM to Teach Quality to Japanese Hospital Doctors

Last week, I wrote about the influence of Total Quality Management (TQM) on Toyota -- in the past and the present, in Japan and beyond. Today, to follow up on that, I'm going to share some excerpts from some material that was shared by a Toyota leader who presented at a hospital I visited earlier this year as part of the Kaizen Institute-organized Japan trip.

TQM at Toyota and the Influence on Lean – Past and Present, Japan and U.S.

Toyota's TQM Activities for organizational vitality and continuous improvement in lean management.

I'm very excited to be leaving for Japan for another study trip in just over a month. This will be my second trip this year, this time with Honsha, after previous (and hopefully future) trips organized by Kaizen Institute.

Even though the previous tours have been focused on Toyota, as well as Lean and Kaizen in various organizations, one common thread is Total Quality Management, or TQM. In many Japanese organizations, TQM has been a solid foundation of practice for two or three decades, where it tended to be a fad here in the U.S., as I've blogged about:

Mark Graban on Measures of Success: Understanding Variation, Reacting Less, and Leading Better

Jamie Flinchbaugh and Mark Graban

oday's episode is the second time that friend and podcast guest Jamie Flinchbaugh has turned the tables by playing host to interview me about my new book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, which has recently been the #1 best selling book in Amazon's Total Quality Management category.

Jamie is very knowledgeable on these topics, so he was a great person to interview me and to have more of a conversation about choosing the right metrics and then managing them the right way. I hope you enjoy the conversation and future podcasts will return to the usual format where I interview guests and try to let them do most of the talking.

Can Lean Improve Spinal Fusion Surgery? Is This the Right Definition or Use of PDSA?

Here's a blog post written by three physicians:

Can the auto industry improve spinal fusion surgery?
It's interesting that they so closely associate Lean with the auto industry when, at this point, Lean is used in virtually every industry and setting. That's why I used the word "Lean" in the title of my blog post here.

They are also authors of a journal article titled "Application of Lean Principles to Neurosurgical Procedures: The Case of Lumbar Spinal Fusion Surgery, a Literature Review and Pilot Series," published in Operative Neurosurgery.

In my post, I comment on their work...

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