tl;dr Lean should reduce hospital overwork and unsafe understaffing — not justify them. True Lean, as practiced at Toyota, treats overburden (muri) as a serious problem, prioritizes patient safety and staff well-being, and invests in understanding real work before setting…
Thanks to Catalysis for asking me to write a guest blog post… yesterday, they published this: Being Open to Learning and Using Process Behavior Charts Means Unlearning Something Else My post starts: “Why don’t people adopt best practices? I get…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Too often, patient involvement in design and research is tokenist or “tick-box”, and requires burdensome processes for participation. To truly design around the patient, research needs to be person-centered. Large healthcare systems continue to consolidate and…
tl;dr: Toyota’s long-term success comes from treating Lean as a people development system, not a toolbox. By prioritizing learning, coaching, and growth over short-term results, Toyota builds stronger capabilities–and better outcomes–over time. When most organizations talk about Lean, they start…
tl;dr: Value isn’t universal. Different customers–and the same customer at different times–define value differently. Lean works best when organizations offer flexible options instead of forcing everyone into the same bundle of value. It’s said in the Lean methodology that “value…
Last week, Herb Kelleher passed away. He was the legendary founder, CEO, and Chairman of Southwest Airlines. Southwest posted a nice tribute photo of him on the front of their website and also put up a special website HonoringHerb.org. Kelleher…
Mark’s Note: I’ve known Ryan McCormack for many years now, thanks to his previous work in Lean healthcare and his attendance at Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit events. He’s been sending out an excellent curated email on Operational Excellence. You can…
Today marks 25 years since W. Edwards Deming passed away in 1993. I remember sitting in a statistics class as an undergraduate at Northwestern University — it must have been January 1994. My professor said something about Dr. Deming’s passing and…
I had a great time and learned so much as a guest of Honsha and their Executive Development Mission trip to Japan in October. The formal site visits to factories and companies were great, but a lot of the learning…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Hospitals have been collecting patient complaint data for decades, but leveraging the data for improvement has remained elusive. Some new publications show how using a big data approach for patient complaint data can help identify…
I'm happy to be hosting, via KaiNexus, another free webinar. Click the link below to register:
How One Community Hospital is Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement
November 28 from 1:00 - 2:00 pm ET
Presented by Mike McGowan, Director of Process Excellence at Marietta Memorial Hospital
This post also includes thoughts from the KaiNexus community about challenges and barriers to improvement and innovation.
My guest for Episode #324 of the podcast is Art Smalley. Art was one of the first Americans to work for Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan and, since then, has been helping other organizations with the Toyota Production System (a.k.a. "Lean") methods and approaches. You can also visit his website to learn more, www.ArtOfLean.com.
Art is a fellow faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute. He has written two Shingo Publication Award-winning books: Creating Level Pull and (co-authored with Durward Sobek) Understanding A3 Thinking. Art later wrote Toyota's Kaizen Methods: Six Steps to Improvement with Isao Kato.
I own all of these books and have only met Art briefly in the past, so I'm happy to finally have him here as a guest. Today, we'll talk about Art's career and his most recent book, Four Types of Problems, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute (note: LEI provided me a free electronic copy of the book).
