Learning from mistakes is not optional in healthcare–it’s essential for patient safety, staff engagement, and long-term performance. For years, I’ve written and spoken about how Lean leadership and Kaizen cultures treat mistakes not as failures to hide, but as signals…
2024 Preface: I’m re-posting this blog post from 2012 about Lean at Boeing. The WSJ headline emphasizes “speed up,” but that could be the fault of their editors not realizing that Lean means quality and flow go hand in hand.…
TL;DR: Kaizen isn’t a Japanese buzzword or a suggestion box–it’s a practical, scientific way for healthcare teams to solve problems, reduce frustration, and improve patient care every day, with leaders acting as coaches instead of gatekeepers. We’re coming up on…
There’s currently quite the discount available on Amazon at the moment for my book (co-authored with Joe Swartz) titled The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen: Leadership for a Continuously Learning and Improving Organization. The paperback is 50% off, available brand…
I received a question from a healthcare leader who had read about the “idea card” format and method that Joe Swartz and I shared in our Healthcare Kaizen books. I read your post about the Idea Card. Amazing! Have a…
Registration is open for “Kaizen Live!” — the 2019 edition. Joe Swartz and I are excited to announce that we are hosting the fourth site visit to his organization, Franciscan St. Francis Health, in Indianapolis. It’s being held October 3…
This podcast is sponsored by Cardinal Health.
Joining me again for episode #301 of the podcast is Joe Swartz, my friend and co-author for our books Healthcare Kaizen and The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen:. You can learn more about our books here. He also contributed a chapter to the book Practicing Lean. (read an excerpt).
Today, we're talking about "Champions of Change," as I've been writing about for Cardinal Health.
One thing I like about Facebook is the way it reminds you about things that happened on this date in previous years. Facebook is reminding me these days about different milestones related to the publication of the book Healthcare Kaizen that…
Kaizen is an incremental approach to problem solving and continuous improvement. We don't need to put pressure on ourselves to make things perfect... we can focus on "a little better, every day."
There are many helpful videos on YouTube with great illustrations of Kaizen and continuous improvement mindsets and principles. In this post, I’m going to share three videos: Kaizen Upon Kaizen in a Team In this video, Ashley explains how a Kaizen…
Thanks to my friends at Gemba Academy for having my Healthcare Kaizen co-author Joe Swartz and me on their podcast, in an episode that was released yesterday.
This post looks back at a podcast that I did a few years ago with Joe Swartz, talking about how he helped introduce Kaizen at Franciscan St. Francis Health and how they’ve built that culture.
