What a great time on Thursday with Masaaki Imai! We were hosted by a non-profit organization, SightLife, that has used Lean to improve the way they collect, process, and ship corneas to transplant patients around the world. It’s a bit…
Today is an exciting day for me, as I’ll get to meet a famed Kaizen guru – Masaaki Imai. We are in Seattle for one leg of his tour to promote the release of the 2nd edition of his classic…
My co-author, Joe Swartz, and I did a soft launch a few weeks back, but we’re happy to announce that the full website for our upcoming book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Improvements is live at www.HCkaizen.com. Details…
Hat tip to John Shook and the Lean Enterprise Institute for pointing this out via his email newsletter — today would have been the 100th birthday of Taiichi Ohno, usually credited as one of the creators of the Toyota Production…
It’s always great to see stories in the major media outlets about engaging front-line staff in improvement ideas. Recently, we had a piece in USA Today that I blogged about and now we have one in the Wall St. Journal…
I volunteered to give a presentation last Friday for the North Texas Society for Healthcare Risk Management, where I was able to debut some new material from our upcoming book, Healthcare Kaizen. These continuous improvement methods are a great way…
Here is a great video by Masaaki Imai, author of the classic books Kaizen: The Key To Japan’s Competitive Success and Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to Management. In the video, he emphasizes that kaizen means continuous improvement and…
I really had a great learning experience at last week’s LEI Lean Transformation Summit that was held here in Dallas. The event sold out six weeks in advance, so a lot of regular attendees got frozen out, unfortunately. All of…
TL;DR (2026): This interview with Masaaki Imai still matters because it captures an early, unvarnished view of how “respect for people” was practiced–not idealized–by Taiichi Ohno and Toyota. It reminds today’s Lean leaders that respect doesn’t mean being soft or…
Masaaki Imai interview! Masaaki Imai comments on the need to convert from batch to JIT and China ‘productivity’, among other topics. One highlight: “Kaizen is the means to achieve a corporate strategy, not the strategy. Every corporation needs to make…
