Tag: Audio

In my time working with hospitals, I've always been very sympathetic to front-line nurses (and other staff). They are far too often overburdened and...

In addition to my blogging here, I write occasionally for our blog over at KaiNexus.com, where we have multiple contributors. I also do monthly webinars and the...

I wrote a new piece for LinkedIn that I hope would be of interest to you even if you’re in healthcare. Why? It’s a story about what an organization does when you don’t have enough (or any) direct work for your front-line staff to do. Toyota would continue paying employees and would put them to...

I get asked a lot, “How do you know if a hospital is truly ‘Lean?'” Nobody is ever perfect or “fully Lean,” but you could ask, “How do you know if somebody is on a legitimate Lean transformation journey?” If you could only ask one question...

Last year, Joe Swartz and I hosted a workshop at his organization, Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. We called it “Kaizen Live!” and it was designed as an opportunity to see a culture of continuous improvement – what does it look like? What do people say?We lay this out in our Healthcare Kaizen books...

Alternate title: “Lean is an Integrated System. Of Course Just Implementing Pieces Leads to Failure.” Throughout the 10 years that I’ve been involved with Lean healthcare efforts, I’ve heard multiple stories of organizations that ended their formal Lean initiatives. They do so, as I’ve been told, because they need to cut costs...

Burris has a new article on the Harvard Business Review website: “Employee Suggestion Schemes Don’t Have to Be Exercises in Futility” In my own work and travels, it’s hard to find anybody who has good things to say about suggestion boxes...

In the article posted today, Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. (the later the author of the popular book How Doctors Think), rant about all sorts of things… some of which have nothing to do with Lean...

A hat tip goes to Brian Buck for sharing this quote via email recently. Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was a pithy and wise man. I didn't remember this quote, but it is attributed to him. It's very appropriate for the type of work we do...

It's very frustrating when I hear people in healthcare complain that their hospital or health system has equated Lean with cost savings -- only focusing on cost reduction or primarily focusing on it...

One of the first people in healthcare to be influenced by Deming’s work is Dr. Don Berwick, founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (at right in that picture). Berwick wrote about Deming’s ideas back in...

When we see a simple error, even in something as silly as sports memorabilia, we would ask "why?" or "how?" instead of "who?" Blaming individuals doesn't help...