As I’ve been working on my upcoming second book, Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Improvements, I’ve had “kaizen” (or continuous improvement) on the brain even more than usual. One distinction between kaizen ideas and a traditional “suggestion system” is…
TL;DR — GM vs. Toyota After the Japan Earthquake General Motors (GM) Toyota Bottom line:This wasn’t a failure of JIT or Lean. It was a leadership choice. Toyota showed that real Lean is about how you treat people when work…
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, joins me to talk about how Lean principles shaped his approach to entrepreneurship, what continuous innovation actually looks like in practice, and why these ideas apply just as much inside large companies as…
Listen: Episode #110 is a chat with Dr. Jack Billi from the University of Michigan Health System and Medical School. Here, we talk about their lean work and how Dr. Billi works with physicians to engage them in lean, tying…
Episode #109 is a discussion with Jim Morgan, Director, Global Body Exterior and Stamping Business Unit Engineering, Ford Motor Company. We will be talking about Lean product development methods in this show. James will be a plenary speaker at the…
It’s time for another in my Reader Questions series, this question comes from Brian via email. If you have a question or topic that you’d like me to address, you can contact me via the web or by leaving a…
At last week’s Shingo Prize conference, I was very excited to meet Dr. Stephen Covey (my podcast is here), but I was just as excited, if not more so, to meet Dr. Brent James, the noted healthcare quality expert from…
If you’ve searched for “Lean methodology,” you’ve probably seen definitions about waste reduction or efficiency. That’s part of it — but Lean is much more than that. It’s a leadership system for building better organizations. I’ve been studying and practicing…
I love NBC’s “The Office” and this clip of Dunder Mifflin’s Dwight Schrute asking a question at the company shareholder’s meeting is pretty funny: Dwight is talking about efficiency of the huge line of angry shareholders. He completely loses the…
University of Michigan looks to lean principles for system-wide improvements – MLive.com Here is some positive news coming out of my home state of Michigan… the U of M health system is a leader in Lean thinking for healthcare. The…
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…
In Episode #69 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast, my guest is Dr. Sami Bahri, D.D.S., widely recognized as the first Lean Dentist. From his practice in Jacksonville, Florida, Dr. Bahri pioneered the application of Lean management principles in dentistry…
