A New Kaizen Event Survey for Hospitals
Last year, I conducted a survey in advance of my book, Lean Hospitals. I’ve been a bit lax about sharing some of the results that I didn’t include in the book. One question was about the use of “events.” As…
Tag Kaizen
Kaizen: Daily Improvement, Learning, and Leadership in Practice
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.
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In Customer Service, Apologizing Does NOT Get to the Root Cause
I walked into my hotel room after three nights of complaining about the internet and found a stuffed bear on the bed. “Beary Sorry,” it said. Hampton Inn logo on the chest. Next to it, a handwritten apology note. I’d…
Presenting at the Lab Quality Confab
I’m giving a talk this morning at the “Lab Quality Confab,” an event for hospital laboratory leaders. The title of my presentation is “Engaging Employees to Embrace Lean and Energize Their Creativity.” I think hospitals have a long way to…
The 20 Things a Supervisor Should Not Say
Thanks to Charlie P. for sharing this gem from the now out of print book: 40 Years, 20 Million Ideas: The Toyota Suggestion System by Yuzo Yasuda. This book was originally published by Productivity Press when Norman Bodek was still…
It’s not the Map that Counts
Congratulations. You’ve mapped out the future state. Now what? | Markovitz Consulting Here’s a post, linked above, from a good friend of the Lean Blog, Dan Markovitz. “After you map the current state, you create a “future state” map that…
Continuous Improvement on a National Scale
By Jamie Flinchbaugh, co-author, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean We all struggle with taking continuous improvement from a department or process level to an enterprise level. But what would it mean to take it to a national level? What would…
Lean and Green at the EPA
By Jason Turgeon: This is a Lean-meets-EPA powerpoint. Download the original here. Click the little window emblem in the upper-right corner of the embedded image to see it full-screen. It’s been a while since I had the chance to post…
Tesco Understands Economics
Sir Terry Leahy: The ‘Robert Mugabe of retail’ bites back – People, News – The Independent First off, that’s a pretty nasty nickname, being called the Robert Mugabe of anything. I don’t know the whole history on that one, but…
Jamie Flinchbaugh Video: Daily Improvement
Everybody Everyday: Managing for Daily Improvement The link above is an online video presentation by Jamie Flinchbaugh, courtesy of IndustryWeek (click here to subscribe to their print edition of the magazine). In This Presentation You Will See How 90% of…
Nice Quote
Heard a great comment today: “Suggestions are things somebody else should do. Ideas are things that I can do.” Maybe that is why Norman Bodek’s books and the others (The Idea Generator: Quick and Easy Kaizen and Ideas Are Free:…
Toyota to Pay for Kaizen OT in Japan
asahi.com article – ENGLISH Interesting article from Japan… Toyota’s 40,000 factory workers in Japan are all engaged in kaizen, or continuous improvement, as a core part of the quality control (QC) activities. No surprise there… Lean and kaizen are tightly…
Airline Kaizen – Action, not Whining
My Way News – Airlines slow down flights to save on fuel I’m just thrilled anytime I see an example of an airline making a process improvement (a “kaizen” if you will) instead of their usual game plan of whining,…
