Tag: Bodek

Today's post is a longer and annotated version of my acceptance speech at last week's Shingo Conference awards gala. It's a great honor that The...

tl;dr: Shigeo Shingo and Norman Bodek understood that humans are fallible, and blaming people does not prevent defects. Mistake-proofing works when it respects people,...

2024 Preface: I'm re-posting this blog post from 2012 about Lean at Boeing. The WSJ headline emphasizes "speed up," but that could be the...

TL;DR: Shohei Ohtani's extraordinary success as a two-way MLB star reflects more than talent--it's a real-world example of the Harada Method, a goal-setting and...

I was incredibly saddened today to hear that Norman Bodek passed away yesterday in Japan, where he had recently moved with his wife, Noriko. Norman...

TL;DR: Most organizations say continuous improvement matters, but treat it as optional--while performance reviews are non-negotiable. That choice reveals more about leadership priorities than...

You might remember my blog post from May about the Shohei Ohtani, a Japanese player for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (that's not a very "lean" team name, is it"). I suggested that Norman Bodek contact baseball or sports writers at publications like ESPN or The Wall Street Journal. The Journal wrote about Ohtani and Harada last week: How Shohei Ohtani Visualized His Baseball Success The Japanese two-way sensation turned to a personal-growth technique called the Harada Method to help him achieve his goals

I first learned about an approach to personal development called "The Harada Method" when Norman Bodek co-authored a book with Takashi Harada: The Harada Method: The Spirit of Self-Reliance. Norman was a guest on my podcast in 2013 to talk about this... The Harada Method has been on mind again recently thanks to the success of Major League Baseball player Shohei Ohtani, from Japan.

I've produced A LOT of content about Kaizen and continuous improvement over the past 11 years, including podcasts and webinars. Somebody asked me to build a "curriculum" and a sequence of podcasts and webinars for people to watch as a way of getting educated about this approach. So this post is an attempt at that...

At the recent Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, there were thought provoking presentations... and we had many discussions about the role of incremental improvement vs. redesign or transformation. And, lots of discussions about imitating vs. innovating... so I explore those themes in this post.

In this post, I share some thoughts and build upon one of the presentations at last week's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, where, Tim Pehrson, a regional CEO for Intermountain Healthcare, talked about how they piloted a continuous improvement process in one region... and how they're now spreading it throughout the system. This leads to confusion, in online discussion, about terms like projects, suggestions, ideas, and such...

My wife and I were in Boston over the weekend, as it was her fifth reunion from her MIT master's program. I'm also an...