Mark’s note: Today’s guest post comes to us from Ireland and a lean consultant and author named Andy Brophy. He has a new book called Innovative Lean, for which he interviewed me and some client team members from Children’s Medical…
Forgive me if some Texas pride comes through in this post, as well as some former-client pride. The clinical laboratory team at Children’s Medical Center Dallas was featured in the peer-reviewed Medical Laboratory Observer for their combination of Lean and…
Top Small Workplaces 2008 – WSJ.com Today’s WSJ was well worth the $2.00. Yes, I subscribe to the online Journal, but there’s something nice about reading the regular print version while traveling. Maybe I should just buy a Kindle as…
Clients of mine always end up saying something like “Lean really gets into your head… it’s hard to turn off” – or at least one on every project ends up saying that. That’s a good thing… a way of thinking,…
Below is some of the text from edition #3 of the newsletter from my upcoming book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction. ————————————— Hospitals are notorious for employing “workarounds” to respond to problems. For example, when supplies…
The News-Gazette.com:Christie campaign has its seed in Toyota production system Here’s another link to a story about Lean progress in a hospital, this time in Champaign, Illinois. It’s especially good they are looking at reducing patient waiting times, MRI, CT…
The second revised (and expanded) edition of Timothy R. Clark’s The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety came out this week. My copy showed up yesterday, and I’ve been working through it. I’ve learned a lot from Tim over the years.…
Twenty years ago, on July 16, 2006, the Lean Blog Podcast began with a conversation with Norman Bodek. Norman was my friend and mentor–and the person who suggested that I start doing audio interviews in the first place. What began…
Practical insights from Mark Graban on Lean management and continuous improvement, leadership, psychological safety, healthcare, and manufacturing.
The Sign on the Wall Was a Confession Two staff members are repositioning a patient by hand. The lift assist that’s supposed to be used for this — the equipment the hospital bought specifically so nobody does it this way…
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…
Nearly two million improvement proposals in a single year. Ninety-seven percent implemented. That doesn’t sound like the suggestion-box model most organizations know. It sounds like something else. The number comes from Toyota’s April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” It…