Today’s post is a throwback to an essay that I originally wrote for the excellent book Lean-Led Hospital Design: Creating the Efficient Hospital of the Future, where it appears in an appendix with some other contributed essays. You can listen to…
It’s been just about 18 years since I was leaving GM to start the master’s program at MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing program (now called Leaders for Global Operations). Here’s a 1992 interview that describes the origins of the program. It…
My friend Ryan, who works at a hospital in Canada, sent me a few pictures of an Industrial Engineering textbook that he used almost 20 years ago. He wrote: “I was cleaning up my upstairs when I came across a…
To the left is a young baby me. I don’t think I was thinking about Dr. Deming as a baby, but thankfully my parents had a lot of intrinsic motivation to take care of me! One of the many things…
Back in 2007, I had my first opportunity to travel to England, a country I really love visiting. I had the chance to attend the “First Global Lean Healthcare Summit” that was produced by Dan Jones and the Lean Enterprise…
I have been going through some old papers recently and I found two sheets of paper with hand-written thoughts or “truisms” that I had scribbled down in early 2002. The word truism, it turns out, doesn’t mean “true” so much as…
Last Monday, I had the chance to attend a Lean Startup event in Austin where Eric Ries announced the launch of a Kickstarter project for a new book. 10 days ago isn't much of
Today’s Throwback Thursday is a look back at a 1993 book that I purchased in 2011 on somebody’s recommendation. It was probably one of those used books you can buy for a penny on Amazon… Creating the New American Hospital: A…
TL;DR: A look back at Lean manufacturing training from 2002 reveals a familiar lesson: Lean succeeds when customers treat suppliers fairly, production schedules are stable, and improvement goes beyond tools to include respect, trust, and Kaizen thinking. Toyota’s approach–then and…
Back in 2011, I wrote this homage to In-N-Out Burger. Their food is awesome, they treat managers and employees with respect, and they pay attention to details. One such example is the simple error proofing of their trashcans, as I wrote…
Last weekend, at a patient safety conference, I heard a physician talk about “robust process improvement” and this, thankfully, included an endorsement of Lean methods. That’s the good news. The bad news was that the physician who was presenting trotted…
Today is another “Throwback Thursday” post where I revisit posts from the past. Friday and Saturday, I’m going to be attending the “Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit” in Irvine, California. I won’t be speaking, but I’ll be participating and networking…
