Now, there’s a story written by an emergency medicine physician, Dr. Brad Cotton, that appears in a publication called “Emergency Medicine News” — FIRST PERSON: ‘We Fired Our Hospital’...
Thanks to my Amazon Kindle app on my iPad, I get to carry much of my book collection with me. Sometimes, while on the road, I end up eating dinner alone with my iPad. Recently, I was in a Japanese…
Regular readers will remember my post about the New England Journal of Medicine piece on Lean by Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. that so badly confused Lean with top-down Taylorism. John Toussaint, M.D., the former CEO of ThedaCare…
Aviation lessons for patient safety anchor this conversation with Steve Montague, a retired Navy fighter pilot and commercial airline pilot who consults with hospitals on high-reliability practices. We get into checklists done well and done badly, why most hospital mistakes…
TL;DR: Trump’s “if I say do it, they’re going to do it” reflects a command and control leadership style that even the military is moving away from. Toyota, Gen. McChrystal, and decades of evidence point to something better. Command and…
Joining me again for Episode #244 is Dan Markovitz. Today’s episode is part 2 of our discussion about his most recent book Building the Fit Organization: Six Core Principles for Making Your Company Stronger, Faster, and More Competitive, a recipient of the Shingo…
Dr. Gary Kaplan is the CEO of Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center, considered one of the world leaders in the adoption of Lean healthcare principles. He wrote the foreword for my book The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen. He co-authored a recent…
A few weeks back, a number of you sent me this article from the New York Times: “Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine“ The article describes a physician who is trying to take the amount of time – the…
Later today and tomorrow, I’ll be attending the annual World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit that’s produced by a non-profit called the Patient Safety Movement. If you’re also at the event, please say hi! Follow the event on the…
I learned about this the other today via Twitter (hat tip to @agile_memes), but today is “World No Resources Day” (see hashtag #WorldNoResourcesDay). See the small website at and their thoughts on “why should I join in?” I’m not sure who is behind…
Here is an article I posted yesterday to LinkedIn: An Airline Worker’s Lament: “They Won’t Let Me Help You.“ On LinkedIn, I’m writing for a more general business audience than I am here on LeanBlog.org. In the situation at the…
One of the variations of my acronym L.A.M.E. is “Lean As Misguidedly Explained,” and I recently ran across two fresh instances of this (and, for once, neither is from the Wall Street Journal!). One example is a news writer who…