Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is an excerpt from the book Remarkable by Toby LaVigne. Toby’s bio can be found at the bottom of this post. In this chapter from the book, Toby writes about a good friend of mine and…
A few weeks back, USA Today published an article that made me think of some of the approaches being used by hospitals under the banner of “Lean Design.” In Lean Design efforts (see this great book), hospitals involve customers (patients…
My wife and I just got back from four days in Napa and Sonoma counties doing, ahem, “gemba walks” at a number of wineries, both large and small. As tourists, we like doing winery visits where you get to walk…
Joe Swartz and I are building upon our well-received (and Shingo Research Award winning) book Healthcare Kaizen with a new special edition aimed at busy senior leaders. The book is available for pre-order now at Amazon.com: The Executive Guide to…
tl;dr: Lean encourages learning and iteration, but PDSA is not a license to roll out poorly tested, customer-facing changes and promise to “fix them later.” I’ve added a new post to my LinkedIn Influencers series: “The Ability to Iterate is…
My guest for episode #170 is Stephen Parry, joining us from England. He is a keynote speaker at the upcoming Lean Kanban North America conference in late April. I will also be a main stage speaker at the event. Parry…
Thanks to Patrick Vlaskovits, a guest in my Podcast episode #99, for posting a photo of a Southwest Airlines magazine blurb about Steve Blank, author of the outstanding book The Four Steps to the Epiphany on “customer development” for Lean…
I recently “fired” my primary care physician. I’m lucky to not have to go to the doctor very often, but the last few times I did, I had to wait more than an hour beyond my scheduled appointment time (in…
I saw this article last week in the USA Today while traveling, with the online headline “Products nipped, tucked to save.” That headline makes me think first of old fashioned cost cutting – which in these economic times often means…
This might seem like a random topic, but what the heck, it’s a Friday. I arrived in Orlando yesterday for the Society for Health Systems and HIMSS conferences and I picked up a rental gar from the garage. It’s a…
Today’s post isn’t strictly about Lean, but I was reminded by a reader to mention something really cool that I saw in Wired Magazine late last year. In the Lean methodology, we focus a lot on “visual management” of processes…
I really enjoyed having the chance to be in Cincinnati yesterday to participate in a Lean Healthcare workshop put on by TechSolve, a non-profit consultancy that teaches process improvement methodologies, including Lean, across multiple industries. We had well over 100…
