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).
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients The benefits of Electronic healthcare records are a polarizing topic with healthcare providers. Standardization and electronic workflows have their upsides, but many are developed to optimize billing and payments, and are not designed with…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient A lot can be done to optimize flow in hospitals without investing in additional staff and infrastructure by using an operations research approach. Here’s an example from Ottawa. Patient interviews can be uncomfortable, and it…
I've been sad the last few days after learning that Samuel Selay, a friend of mine (and this blog) went missing after going kayaking alone on Lake Elsinore in southern California on Saturday. As it says in this news report and video...
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient CMAJ summarizes how to improve the quality of healthcare in Canada. Nothing new here, which begs the question – what are we waiting for? Intermountain Health in Utah has a reputation for creating value for…
Skip Steward, the Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care in Tennessee, was a guest on Episode #314 of the podcast talking about TWI and Toyota Kata in healthcare (he was joined by Brandon Brown).
Today, I've asked Skip to come back and chat 1x1, in Episode #320, about his experience with Don Wheeler, learning from W. Edwards Deming, and more. I hope you enjoy his reflections, our discussions about healthcare, and connections to my book Measures of Success (Skip undoubtedly has a book in him too).
Jet lag, even well managed and planned for, meant I was awake early on a Sunday morning. Over breakfast, I read more about news from last week, that GE had fired their CEO John Flannery after 14 months and replaced him with a relatively new board member, Larry Culp.
Culp is GE's first outsider CEO hire in their 100+ year history. So who is this guy and why did they hire him?
Culp was CEO of Danaher, a company that's quite often held up as the best non-Toyota Lean company out there. And they're an American company. Danaher, through its Danaher Business System (DBS) approach, uses Lean as a business strategy in a way that's very different than Toyota. Danaher has acquired companies and brought DBS and Lean in as a way to turn around and improve those businesses.
My guest for Episode #319 is Karen Martin, whose most recent book is Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance. She was previously a guest on Episodes #151, #190, and #285.
Karen is an author of many books on Lean, quality, and performance excellence. She is also a speaker and a consultant with a B.S. in Microbiology from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. in Education from California State University, Bakersfield. Read her full bio.
What is clarity? How can we work toward creating less fog and more clarity in organizations? We'll talk about that, along with a bit of discussion about clarity in metrics, as I write about in my book Measures of Success.
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient The legendary quality leader W. Edwards Deming is widely known for his thoughts on statistics and systems. However, Deming believed that psychology was of crucial importance when improving organizational performance. The Institute for Improvement in Healthcare shares…
