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).
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).