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…
TL;DR — GM vs. Toyota After the Japan Earthquake General Motors (GM) Toyota Bottom line:This wasn’t a failure of JIT or Lean. It was a leadership choice. Toyota showed that real Lean is about how you treat people when work…
One of my favorite of the 14 “Toyota Way” principles to discuss with hospitals, in particular, is principle #8, which says: “Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.” Too many organizations, across multiple industries, think…
This blog post is about my first visit to TMMTX in 2010.
People often ask “So where did the term ‘lean’ come from?” It didn’t come from Toyota. And the term isn’t an acronym (so no need to type it as LEAN or L.E.A.N.). The term came from John Krafcik, who was…
Due out in June is a book that I think will be an important one for the Lean Healthcare movement. That book is about the Lean journey of the Wisconsin health system ThedaCare. It’s called On the Mend: Transforming Healthcare…
TL;DR: NPR’s “End of the Line” on NUMMI reminds us that performance problems weren’t caused by “bad workers,” but by bad management systems. The same people who sabotaged cars under GM built world-class quality under Toyota. My experience with a…
TL;DR: Data is what gets recorded. Facts are what’s actually happening. Confusing the two is how leaders get fooled by faked reports, broken sensors, and decorated dashboards. Deming and Ohno both warned about this in different ways. The fix is…
This article from Detroit’s Crain’s Business Journal (“Lean machine: Health care follows auto’s lead, gears up for efficiency”) highlights a growing lean healthcare movement in my home state of Michigan, one that, ironically, traces its origins back to Toyota General…
Article Link: “Shorter hospital stays through better coordination” Is Lean a global phenomenon, or what? Here is a story from a Korean news website (in English) about a German consulting firm that’s an offshoot of a manufacturer (Porsche) helping hospitals…
Calif. to get dose of auto anguish | Detroit Free Press | Freep.com Here’s a recent story about the demise of NUMMI, in which, the reporter wrote: “On the manufacturing side, GM did sustain much of what it learned from…
I love it when I have a chance to meet Lean Blog readers and Twitter followers in the “real world.” In the past few weeks, I’ve finally met, in person, @flynncraig and @bryanlvt (at the Dan Jones Lean Healthcare Transformation…
