Last week, I had the opportunity to spend a day with my Healthcare Kaizen co-author Joe Swartz and his colleagues at one of the three hospitals in the Franciscan St. Francis Health system. It was my second visit and, like…
Out there in the Lean and quality improvement communities, you sometimes hear some silly things. Sometimes, I want to attach the “Lean As Mistakenly Explained” (or L.A.M.E.) label to what’s said when it really seems off the mark from what…
It has been right about three years since I was introduced to Dr. Greg Jacobson via a reader of this blog. It was great to meet a physician who had read, loved, and practiced the ideas from Masaaki Imai’s book Kaizen.…
There’s a great piece, currently available for free on the HBR website, about continuous improvement: The Culture to Cultivate The author, George Halvorson, is the recently retired CEO of Kaiser Permanente and it’s really helpful that he is writing about…
I’ve been going back through my notes and pictures from my first trip to Japan in November… my goal is to blog about something or share a picture on a weekly basis. Read more about my guides, Kaizen Institute. We visited…
Mark’s note — today’s guest post is by my friend Karen Martin, my guest for Podcast #151 where we talked about her latest book The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence. Karen…
As we enter the new year, it’s a great time to reflect back on 2012 – what worked and what didn’t work… what do we plan to do differently in 2013? Those are some of the core questions found on…
Mark’s note: Today’s guest post is from a friend of mine from The Netherlands. I had a chance to visit Marc and his hospital back in 2009 and I’ve seen Marc and colleagues the last three years at the Lean…
Mark’s note: Today’s vacation post is from my good friend Dan Markovitz, who normally blogs here. Listen to my podcasts with him here and here. By Dan Markovitz: You’d think by now we’d be past this sort of nonsense that…
I first blogged about the possibility in March – doing a weeklong study trip to Japan with Lean Healthcare professionals, in partnership with Kaizen Institute. The dates are set for November 11 to 17 and we have people signed up…
TL;DR: Long before Lean and Kaizen became common language in healthcare, Don Berwick argued in a 1989 New England Journal of Medicine article that improvement requires leaders to stop blaming “bad apples” and start fixing systems. His message–replace fear with…
In this month’s ASQ blog post, their CEO Paul Borawski writes a new post “The Intersection of Quality and Social Responsibility,” where he defines Social Responsibility succinctly as “Doing well by doing good.” One reason I have always been attracted…
