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.
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…
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…
