Our guest for Episode #96 is Pascal Dennis of Lean Pathways, Inc. Pascal is a faculty member with the Lean Enterprise Institute and he’s the author of the books: Lean Production Simplified, Andy & Me: Crisis And Transformation On The…
Due out in June is a book that I think will be an important one for the Lean Healthcare movement. That book is about the Lean journey of the Wisconsin health system ThedaCare. It’s called On the Mend: Transforming Healthcare…
Keeping things light on a Saturday… New York Magazine has a funny photo story series of President Obama on tours of different factories and laboratories (hat tip to @counternotions on Twitter). The series is called “A History of Obama Feigning…
TL;DR: Data is what gets recorded. Facts are what’s actually happening. Confusing the two is how leaders get fooled by faked reports, broken sensors, and decorated dashboards. Deming and Ohno both warned about this in different ways. The fix is…
I had an interesting encounter at the Kendall Square Au Bon Pain yesterday morning. Not a bad customer experience, but something I noticed in the checkout process that might be worth discussing. I had a bagel sandwich (wasbai salmon on…
Today’s blog post will be just a bunch of random thoughts. For one, I just got back from London last night after a whirlwind Lean healthcare tour. I visited five hospitals between London and the south of England in three…
TL;DR: At GM, fear and poor leadership blocked bad news from flowing both up and down the organization. Executives were shielded from reality, frontline workers weren’t told the truth, and trust eroded as a result. Without leaders going to the…
This sign and picture might be a bit rude, so I saved this for a Saturday. To me, a very powerful and often unknown principle of the Toyota Production System and Lean is the idea that managers must “explain why”…
A Carmaker As A Model For A Hospital? – CBS News Virginia Mason Medical Center and their use of Lean and TPS was featured on the CBS Evening News on Saturday. This is huge, I think, for the lean healthcare…
Ah, summits. I once watched Coach Pat Summitt’s Tennessee Lady Volunteers take a 35 to 2 lead against my Northwestern Wildcats in the first few minutes of an NCAA basketball tournament game. That was too big of a deficit to…
Firms Race To Regain Control Over Inventories – WSJ.com With the dramatically slowing global economy, it’s no surprise that companies and supply chains are getting socked with excess inventories right now. The WSJ discussion very quickly turned to software: The…
Donald Berwick: Curing the Healthcare System – BusinessWeek Good exposure for the applicability and use of Lean concepts in healthcare in BusinessWeek. Dr. Berwick is the head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (based in Cambridge, coincidentally, like the Lean…