Organizational culture isn’t what leaders say—it’s what people experience every day based on management behaviors, systems, and priorities. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on culture through a Lean lens, exploring how leadership decisions shape trust, psychological safety, learning, and performance. Many of these posts draw on lessons from Deming, Toyota, healthcare, and real organizations to show that culture is not a program to roll out, but an outcome leaders create—intentionally or not.
Preventable medical mistakes remain one of the most serious challenges in healthcare, yet many hospitals still struggle with learning from medical errors and preventing them from happening again. From emergency departments to pathology labs, the same types of errors continue…
My mom is a retired public school elementary teacher, so I’ve heard plenty of stories about bad management decisions within a school system and other craziness that runs the risk of crushing souls… but thankfully my mom (and so many…
Here’s a question from a healthcare leader that I thought I’d share for input from you, the blog readers. This person is looking to change their hiring and people “sourcing” practices, after visiting ThedaCare and learning about their “Human Development…
Dr. Robert Wachter has a great column in today’s USA Today: “Column: Gregory House M.D.: RIP” and it’s republished on his blog, with its own comment section. I wrote a comment, which is awaiting moderation, and I’ll repost it here….…
There’s a new TED conference video from April 2012 featuring Dr. Atul Gawande, author of amazing books including The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.” The core of the video will be familiar if you remember my blog post…
Dr. W. Edwards Deming famously said that managers can’t hope to motivate employees, as they can only hope to not demotivate them. I wrote about this in my post “If management stopped demotivating their employees…” Deming had a chart that…
Our guest for episode #136 is Paul Akers, President of FastCap and author of the book 2 Second Lean. Here, we are talking about the new book and how small improvements that save two seconds in your daily work can…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post by Bart Sellers is a timely contribution to follow up to yesterday’s post about the ThedaCare Business Performance System and the journal article about that great work. Bart has been a frequent commenter here on…
One of the most powerful thoughts in the book On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry (by John Toussaint MD and Roger Gerard PhD) is the quote; “the ultimate arrogance is to change the way…
As I was cleaning out a pile of stuff in my office, I found an unread issue of Inc. magazine from June 2011. One of their “Best Small Company Workplaces” was Hopkins Printing in Columbus, Ohio: “Survival of the Smartest:…
Yesterday, the MIT SDM program hosted a webinar by Dr. Jack Billi from University of Michigan. I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Billi a few times during my involvement in the Healthcare Value Network. He is an extremely…
I was in Canada a few weeks back and two articles from the Globe and Mail newspaper caught my eye – stories from England and Russia. The first was what could be considered a lighthearted story about the excesses of…
