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 saw this van in Boston the other day. I can’t find a listing in the Yellow Pages for who they are or what they do, but I like the name of the company. Do they really practice continuous improvement,…
Calif. to get dose of auto anguish | Detroit Free Press | Freep.com Here’s a recent story about the demise of NUMMI, in which, the reporter wrote: “On the manufacturing side, GM did sustain much of what it learned from…
Our friends at ThedaCare are running an experiment this week. One of their Rapid Improvement Event team members is going to send a few Twitter updates about the process for their event. In healthcare “R.I.E.” is a commonly used term…
By Matt Wrye: Big K vs. Little k has different meanings depending on what you are talking about. In baseball, big K means you struck out looking and little k means you struck out swinging (some use a forward k…
Video #7 is a continuation of Episode #3 with Norman Bodek recounting his early trips to Japan and learning about kaizen, just in time, and Lean. For audio podcast episodes, please visit www.leanpodcast.org. For video podcasts, you can also go…
A question came in from a blog reader — simple question with no simple or easy answers: Who are the Lean Thinking CEOs? My first thought is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, for his famous customer obsession and belief in long-term thinking…
Note: Welcome LEI visitors… you can check out my main blog page at www.leanblog.org, as I hope you’ll come back. Here are some other recent posts: Where Did I Start With Lean? One Purple Audacious Goal Caution! Warning Signs in…
By Mark Graban: I’m always fascinated by Starbucks. For one, I’m a regular customer and Starbucks has a reputation for hiring pretty educated people as baristas given their health benefits and all. So it seems like a huge opportunity to…
I have always learned a lot from John Shook. As I’ve blogged about before, I’ve seen John present about TPS and management (leadership, really) a few times and probably learn more “insights per hour” than anyone else in the Lean…
Toyota Names Akio Toyoda President, Apologizes to Shareholders for Losses This was rumored for a while, but Toyota has formally named Akio Toyoda as the next President. Yes, “Toyoda” with a “d” — that’s the family name. Back when Toyota…
Toyota Is Tightening Its Belt – NYTimes.com The words don’t appear directly in the article, but the RSS blurb for this article (repeated in many “Tweets” and RSS feed news sources) reads: “Toyota Tightens Its Belt – In a soft…
I found a few articles lately about Lean being implemented in some Ohio hospitals, so I’ll share two of them here. Crescent-News.com – Hospitals headed to the ER? This first article focuses more on the problems faced by Ohio hospitals…
