Tag: Healthcare

When surgeons have no better options than complaining about process problems on LinkedIn, are their leaders and organizations really properly supporting them? In this post, we'll explore questions of blame, accountability, and engaging people in process improvement... being of better service to them.

I was recently asked to do a recorded video presentation for a medical conference in Turkey. I spoke about the dual pillars of "The Toyota Way": Respect for People Continuous Improvement The video is about 20 minutes, split about half and half on each of those interrelated topics. I'm coming to you from a hotel room, somewhat tired after a day of consulting. (Slides PDF and transcript also included)

After I kicked off the Lean Six Sigma World Conference this week, I had the fantastic opportunity to hear the now-legendary Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger...

Last week, a nurse manager downloaded the free first chapter of my book Lean Hospitals and wrote this message in the contact form: "Interested to see how the disconnect between management and the staff supervised can be helped. Too many managers refuse to help those they supervise. A growing number have never done the work that they are in charge of getting done. Patients and residents feel it, not healthy. Poor PR. It does get back to the consumer. Difficult to fix at that point." In my experience working with many hospitals, her comments resonate with me. Identifying problems like these doesn't mean Lean provides easy solutions for organizational transformation.

I'm really happy to be playing the role of host for this free webinar that's being presented next Friday, March 30th: Engaging Leaders and the Baldrige Framework to Advance Excellence A Look into the Extraordinary Work at Mary Greeley Medical Center The webinar is being presented by Karen Kiel-Rosser and Ron Smith from Mary Greeley Medical Center. If you can't attend the live session, we'll send you the recording if you register. The throwback component of this post is a look back at a podcast that I did with Karen three years ago this month:

Over the years, many people have asked me some variation of the question: "Why are my employees not embracing Lean?" More often than not, the tone of the question is of blame... blaming the employees for not embracing Lean. In this post, I share something I originally wrote on LinkedIn and I'll elaborate a bit and share some of the LinkedIn comments...

Today, I'd like to share the latest in my series of articles about "Champions of Change," which is based on a discussion I had with Joe Swartz about continuous improvement in materials and supply chain settings.

Today, I'd like to share the latest in my series of articles about "Champions of Change," which is based on a discussion I had with Suzi Collins, an experienced Lean healthcare supply chain leader.

I’ve heard a lot of rumblings recently about what might be happening at ThedaCare, a health system in Wisconsin that’s been considered one of the best examples of "Lean healthcare" anywhere in the world for more than a decade. It seems that there is an evolution occurring in their approach to Lean. I’ve received a formal statement from ThedaCare public relations, which you can find in this post, so I will stick to the facts that they have given me and other information that's publicly available online.

As I blogged about yesterday, things went well at the Oscars... or, at least, no errors were made in the announcements. But that thing that didn't go well was the TV ratings. Two Data Points Are Not a Trend The headlines I saw had a lot of two-data-point comparisons. Headlines sometimes gave the percentage decrease in viewers or how many million fewer viewers there were. Many talked about "record low" but if you're tracking a metric "record low" or "all-time high" doesn't mean there's a "special cause." That "record low" could still be noise in the system.

Tomorrow, my post will be about headlines that scream about ratings for The Oscars being "down from last year" or "the lowest in X years." As I've blogged about before, I'm always skeptical of such simplistic comparisons that might mask the real underlying trend. But first, could the Academy avoid last year's embarrassing mixup?

Here's an interesting Bloomberg article about Toyota never being satisfied, which includes improving the way they improve: "Toyota's Way Changed the World's Factories. Now the Retool" Did you know that Toyota has a central TPS group??