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.
I stumbled across a surprising use of the word “kaizen” the other day from a surprising source – TV entertainment reporter and actress Maria Menounos. She talked about kaizen in an interview about her book The EveryGirl’s Guide to Life.
TL;DR: Yokoten spreads learning horizontally so teams can go see, think, and build on ideas–not blindly copy them. Mark’s Note: Today’s post is from Al Norval, with the firm Lean Pathways, Inc. Yokoten Means Copy and Improve — Not Copy…
I am happy to share, with permission, a new journal article that I co-authored with Jim Adams (“The Synthesizer“), the senior director of laboratory operations at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. It is now published in the Wiley journal “Global Business…
As I’m going through revisions of my book, Lean Hospitals, a theme jumps out at me in Chapter 2…. it’s all about trust. The first excerpt says: Gary Convis, a retired Toyota senior vice president who had been one of…
I saw this article last week in the USA Today while traveling, with the online headline “Products nipped, tucked to save.” That headline makes me think first of old fashioned cost cutting – which in these economic times often means…
When an organization sets a target for the number of kaizen ideas employees should submit, it usually gets exactly what it asked for — a number. What it doesn’t get is genuine improvement. The ideas come in to hit the…
Hi – As a reader of my blog, your input and thoughts are important to me. I am currently co-authoring a new book with Joe Swartz (from the Franciscan Health System in Indiana) on a subset of Lean methods, focused…
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…
Mark’s note: I’m happy to have a new guest blogger, Dr. Wiljeana Glover, from MIT, and a fellow member of the Society for Health Systems. The plan is that Wiljeana will be a regular guest blogger here. Greetings to the…
Regular readers might know that I’m working on a second book project, about “kaizen” (continuous improvement) in healthcare. Sign up to receive more info about the book, Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Improvements. I have a lot of…
Friday, I blogged about a WIRED Magazine piece by Joel Johnson that was pretty disrespectful of manufacturing, in general, as he wrote that “every single manufacturing job ever” was “repetitive, exhausting, and [an] alienating workplace over which you have no…
This might seem like a random topic, but what the heck, it’s a Friday. I arrived in Orlando yesterday for the Society for Health Systems and HIMSS conferences and I picked up a rental gar from the garage. It’s a…