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 alum, but was considered a “guest” since I graduated 16 years ago from my program and…
Last week, I had the opportunity to spend a day with my Healthcare Kaizen co-author Joe Swartz and his colleagues at one of the three hospitals in the Franciscan St. Francis Health system. It was my second visit and, like…
People often say Lean is pretty simple (or that it’s just “common sense“). Yeah, some of the concepts are simple… but sometimes deceptively so. Or, we find that it’s easier to describe Lean (as a management system, a set of…
Last Thursday, Joe Swartz and I presented about “Kaizen Coaching” at the annual Shingo Institute Conference. In the start of our breakout session, I made a point I usually make, something I learned from Norman Bodek: “A suggestion is something…
There’s a great piece, currently available for free on the HBR website, about continuous improvement: The Culture to Cultivate The author, George Halvorson, is the recently retired CEO of Kaiser Permanente and it’s really helpful that he is writing about…
Joining me once again for episode #176 is my mentor and good friend Norman Bodek, who has been a guest many times here. Today, we are talking about his latest book, The Harada Method: The Spirit of Self-Reliance.
The team at KaiNexus (where I am the “chief improvement officer”) is always improving. I want to share a few of these improvements, as our CEO/co-founder Greg Jacobson, MD and I are presenting today at the annual conference of the…
There are many articles written about collaborative “ideation” systems (sometimes referred as “crowdsourcing”) – web and software systems that allow ideas to bubble up from a large population of employees. I’d call these “suggestions,” per Norman Bodek’s definition that ideas…
Saw this in the most recent Fast Company: Is Your Manager A Creativity Killer? If the manager is something like a case study from the book The No A**hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t,…
My co-author, Joe Swartz, and I did a soft launch a few weeks back, but we’re happy to announce that the full website for our upcoming book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Improvements is live at www.HCkaizen.com. Details…
Norman Bodek recorded this conversation with me in early 2012, on what would have been Taiichi Ohno’s 100th birthday. Having first met Ohno in 1981 and gone on to publish the English translation of Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production,…
Hat tip to John Shook and the Lean Enterprise Institute for pointing this out via his email newsletter — today would have been the 100th birthday of Taiichi Ohno, usually credited as one of the creators of the Toyota Production…
