Tag: Deming

Lean thinkers do their best to avoid blaming individuals for systemic problems. This lesson comes also from W. Edwards Deming who was deeply influential...

Here is an article that I wrote and published on LinkedIn on Tuesday on the topic of managing metrics in a better, less wasteful, less frustrating, and more productive manner.

I recently got to meet Prof. Donald J. Wheeler when he gave a keynote talk at the Society for Health Systems Conference. Check out his book Understanding Variation and learn more about him in this post.

Today is the start of the main days of the annual Society for Health Systems Conference. I think this is my 9th year attending out of the past 11 or so. Follow the action on Twitter using hashtag #SHS2017. Here are a few posts from the past conferences:

During the class, there was a case study discussion about a hospital that was trying to solve the problem of nurses not always scanning patient bar codes and medications 100% of the time. In the discussion, I was disappointed that an attendee fell back on saying...

Alternative headline: “Poorly Designed Card Trips Up Beatty and Dunaway at The Oscars.” Or “A Bad Process Beats Warren Beatty Every Time.” What are the Lean lessons from this mistake?

I continue sharing documents from the Don Ephlin library archive. What did Ford and the UAW learn when they visited Japan in 1981? Many of the things that made Japanese industry successful are the same things that make organizations successful with Lean today, including in healthcare.

Today's post points to my guest blog post for the W. Edwards Deming Institute: Reflections on Dr. Deming's Hospital Notes - What Has Changed Since 1990? Why do the same problems that Dr. Deming experienced as a patient 30 years ago still happen so often today?

Are there parallels between medicine and organizations when we look at the tension between heroism and the sometimes boring work of preventing problems and improving things? I comment on an article by Dr. Atul Gawande…

Yesterday, the W. Edwards Deming Institute published the second in my series of three posts for them: "The Failure of "The Livonia Philosophy" at my GM Plant." Read more...

My favorite book, as I've written about before, is not a "Lean book" -- it's Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler, PhD. It might look like a book about statistics...

I'm extremely honored that The W. Edwards Deming Institute published my first blog post in a series of three that I've written for them, to be published over the next month or so.