Hopefully you've already seen the famed 1980 NBC documentary "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" that featured Dr. W. Edwards Deming. I posted a link to the video and some notes on Part 1 of the broadcast. Today, I'd like to blog about Part 3 of the program...
Going through some old files, I found an article that I wrote back in late 2005. I wrote it for somebody within our J&J Lean Healthcare circles, trying to help draw parallels to the idea that a hospital lab couldn’t just copy a “Lean layout” without also changing the way they work. I never published it
For today’s Throwback Thursday, I somehow stumbled across this video on YouTube… it’s a video from 1946 that was produced by General Motors, their industrial engineering staff, the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University), and the University of Iowa.
TL;DR: A re-aired episode of This American Life on NUMMI highlights enduring lessons about leadership, learning, and Lean. While critics like Labor Notes frame Lean as “management by stress,” my experience inside GM–and later in healthcare–points to management systems, not…
Editor’s note (2026): In an era of AI, dashboards, and real-time data, Spear’s reminder still holds: information only matters if it changes behavior. TL;DR: Steve Spear argues that organizations deliver quality and value faster not by working harder, but by…
I have been going through some old papers recently and I found two sheets of paper with hand-written thoughts or “truisms” that I had scribbled down in early 2002. The word truism, it turns out, doesn’t mean “true” so much as…
Here’s my latest cartoon collaboration with a skilled artist (and medical assistant), Carrie Schurman. You can see the whole series via this link. A Common Workplace Message: “Leave Your Brain at the Door” How many organizations — explicitly or implicitly —…
Announcement: Dr. Greg Jacobson and I are doing a new webinar for KaiNexus on “More Leadership Behaviors That Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement‘” on January 27. It’s free… learn more and register here. * * * * * *…
It’s a simple question: what’s up with so many men wearing ties in healthcare? Are you / they wearing them because you like to, want to, or have to? When I worked at a video game and computer software store…
Time magazine recently featured GM’s relatively new CEO, Mary Barra, on the cover and in this story: “Mary Barra’s Bumpy Ride at the Wheel of GM“ Also, here is a USA Today summary that says “Five things ‘Time’ revealed about GM…
My blog will turn 10 years old in February 2015. You’re probably either thinking, “Wow, that’s awesome!” or “Get a life, dude.” :-) Here’s a look back at some of the posts from August 6 in past years… what was…
TL;DR: Automakers often overproduce because incentives reward shipping cars to dealers, not matching real demand. Excess capacity, revenue rules, and “channel stuffing” drive inventory waste–and healthcare faces similar pressures that create overutilization and distorted metrics. “Where the World’s Unsold Cars…
