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.
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…
Here’s a nice video that popped up on YouTube from the Toronto-area University Health Network system, with healthcare professionals talking about how Lean has led to a better work environment, a new culture, and an increased capacity to care for…
This has been sitting in my “to blog about” queue since March, but I wanted to catch up and post this article: “What Makes a Hospital Great” by Dr. Pauline Chen. Maybe it’s not very “lean” of me to have…
The articles from the July/August 2011 issue of Inc. Magazine aren’t online yet, but there are two things I wanted to go ahead and blog about. One article had a very “Like Lean” attitude about employee motivation and the other…
Thanks to those of you who sent me the link to this Washington Post article called “The Pain of Wrong Site Surgery.” The piece highlights how the patient safety battle has not yet been won and “some researchers and patient…
Most (all?) of us here did NOT graduate from Harvard Medical School last week. But, we all can read the commencement address that was given by Dr. Atul Gawande, surgeon and author of great books such as Better: A Surgeon’s…
As somebody who flies about 75,000 miles a year, I am far too acquainted with the Transportation Security Administration and their annoyances (to the passenger) and their documented shortcomings (in their effectiveness). That said, everybody deserves a workplace where they…
When hospital people say they don’t want to be a factory or “we don’t want assembly-line medicine,” the statement often goes unchallenged. What is the statement or the anxiety behind such a statement? I sometimes challenge in a friendly way…
It’s great to see Lean mentioned in mainstream healthcare management publications, such as the article in HealthLeaders (print and online) called “Systemwide Process Improvement.” The article highlights one hospital you might know really well, Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center (featured…
In the news yesterday, a General Motors recall over what could be just one isolated steering wheel problem in an Ohio-built Chevrolet (don’t call it Chevy) Cruze. Most news stories, like this one, about the recall just mention that one…