Kaizen is often misunderstood as small ideas or isolated improvement events. In practice, Kaizen is a daily, people-centered approach to learning and improving work—supported by leadership, good systems, and psychological safety. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and real-world examples of Kaizen in action, across healthcare and other industries, with a consistent focus on leadership behaviors, respect for people, and learning from problems rather than hiding them.
A key Kaizen principle is continually improving through incremental improvements. When we use a Kaizen process to improve our work, we’re not likely to make things perfect — just better. One Kaizen often leads to another, as we get positive…
Thanks to the Lean Enterprise Institute for publishing my article about Kaizen, new habits, and New Year’s resolutions: Take Baby Steps Towards Improvement “As 2019 begins, don’t feel bad if your New Year’s resolutions have already gotten off track or…
When I got back from Japan a few weeks back, somebody at a hospital client of mine asked me:
"Why go back to Japan again? Haven't you been there, done that?"
Why go back to Japan? Why not go back? I learn something new and have great experiences each time and my recent opportunity to tag along with Honsha was no exception.
Jet lag, even well managed and planned for, meant I was awake early on a Sunday morning. Over breakfast, I read more about news from last week, that GE had fired their CEO John Flannery after 14 months and replaced him with a relatively new board member, Larry Culp.
Culp is GE's first outsider CEO hire in their 100+ year history. So who is this guy and why did they hire him?
Culp was CEO of Danaher, a company that's quite often held up as the best non-Toyota Lean company out there. And they're an American company. Danaher, through its Danaher Business System (DBS) approach, uses Lean as a business strategy in a way that's very different than Toyota. Danaher has acquired companies and brought DBS and Lean in as a way to turn around and improve those businesses.
In the third and final part of this series, I share more about how Toyota teaches about TPS and TQM... and how they are sharing that approach with doctors and hospitals.
I'm excited that our sold-out "Symposium on Learning Organizations" group will be visiting Toyota's San Antonio plant on Wednesday. Later that day, we'll be touring the Garrison Brothers Distillery and, on Thursday, we are using their "barrel barn" as a venue for "Open Space" discussions, the Red Bead Experiment, and more. We have a group of 40 from many industries attending and we might run a similar event in a different location in the future.
I've blogged about Garrison Brothers and my stint as a bottling line volunteer before...
In that post, I shared pictures of me working to dip bottles of bourbon into a sealing wax. I was wearing a winter coat because it was February in Texas and there was a bit of snow and ice that week.
When I was back there recently, I saw some additional improvements that seem like "Kaizen" to me.
I'm very excited to be leaving for Japan for another study trip in just over a month. This will be my second trip this year, this time with Honsha, after previous (and hopefully future) trips organized by Kaizen Institute.
Even though the previous tours have been focused on Toyota, as well as Lean and Kaizen in various organizations, one common thread is Total Quality Management, or TQM. In many Japanese organizations, TQM has been a solid foundation of practice for two or three decades, where it tended to be a fad here in the U.S., as I've blogged about:
Some colleagues recently sent me a Harvard Business Review article that has a fairly accusatory title, although many readers might think it applies to other managers:
Most Managers Don't Know How to Coach People. But They Can Learn.
It's a common dynamic for people to overstate their own abilities. When it comes to "coaching" in the workplace:
Why do people fear change? Why are adults afraid of talking about their fears? My guest today is eminently qualified to answer such questions and to provide advice that can help us. My guest for Episode #315 is Robert Maurer, Ph.D., author of the outstanding book Mastering Fear.
Bob was previously my guest for Episode #153, where we discussed one of his earlier books on Kaizen, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. By the way, earlier this year I noticed that his other book The Spirit of Kaizen was one of the few books by an American author that Toyota was selling at the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology in Nagoya (see photo below).
I hope you enjoy today's discussion on Mastering Fear. As the subtitle says, can we "harness emotion to achieve excellence in health, work, and relationships"?
Somebody pointed Dominic Rubino to me as somebody who could be a guest on his podcast. His podcast is focused on cabinet makers and woodworkers. I don't know anything about that field. But, I think our conversation goes to show that concepts of Lean, Kaizen (continuous improvement), and practices for metrics are pretty transferrable across industries.
This post builds off of a little rant I went on over on LinkedIn. I wrote:
The Catch-22 of "Lean" training and "implementation"...
Executives want big returns and high ROI. That's understandable.
But, at the core of Lean, if you're going to call it that, is "#Kaizen," which means allowing everybody to do small improvements even if there isn't big ROI.
Thanks to posting about the trip on LinkedIn, I learned that Mike Bukowski is now working for Sazerac, the parent company of Buffalo Trace, in a process improvement role. Last year, Mike attended the site visit and class that Joe Swartz and I hosted at Franciscan St. Francis Health.
Mike has embraced might call "lessons from Toyota," as taught to healthcare people, and is now training and coaching people who make some very fine bourbon, including Aaron Krentz, Processing Supervisor (at right).