TL;DR: Nurses typically spend only 30% of their time on direct patient care. This post walks through the eight types of waste in healthcare — with real hospital examples — and how Lean methods have helped some organizations reclaim that…
TL;DR: At Toyota, the principle is closer to “respect for humanity” than “respect for people” — and that difference matters. It’s not a slogan or a soft value. It is one of two equally important pillars of the Toyota Production…
In his kickoff to the Lean Startup Conference, Eric Ries promised that there was so much content and so many speakers crammed into the day that we would all have a headache at some point. Yes, that came true for…
While working in different environments and different industries, I’ve seen many work requirements that were deemed “non-negotiable” by management – and rightly so. For example, wearing safety glasses in a factory or wearing gloves when handling specimens in a hospital…
Our Kaizen Institute guide, Brad Schmidt (pictured above) talked to us on Monday about standardized work. He said, of the practice at Toyota, that it’s “voluntary standardization.” This is revolutionary thinking, I believe, for much of the Lean community and…
Former Wiremold CEO Art Byrne explains why Lean must be led directly by the CEO and treated as a core business strategy–not a set of tools. Drawing on his experience at GE, Danaher, and The Wiremold Company, Byrne shares how…
As the creator of the admittedly awkward L.A.M.E. acronym (meaning Lean As Mistakenly Explained or Lean As Misguidedly Executed), one burden is that I often get emails tipping me off to L.A.M.E. sightings. In a nutshell, it’s L.A.M.E. when a…
Preventable medical mistakes remain one of the most serious challenges in healthcare, yet many hospitals still struggle with learning from medical errors and preventing them from happening again. From emergency departments to pathology labs, the same types of errors continue…
In this month’s ASQ blog post, their CEO Paul Borawski writes a new post “The Intersection of Quality and Social Responsibility,” where he defines Social Responsibility succinctly as “Doing well by doing good.” One reason I have always been attracted…
My mom is a retired public school elementary teacher, so I’ve heard plenty of stories about bad management decisions within a school system and other craziness that runs the risk of crushing souls… but thankfully my mom (and so many…
I’m in Las Vegas, speaking today to close the Lean Healthcare PowerDay event. There are many great speakers, including Dr. Richard Shannon, Dr. David Munch, and my good friend and fellow author, Naida Grunden. Click on their names to listen…
Mark’s Note: Today is another excellent post by Christina Kach. She touches on many of the misunderstandings of miscommunications about Lean in this post and you might recognize much of what she’s identified as “L.A.M.E.”, not Lean. “Lean is patient…