My friend Pete Abilla has started a nice series of “Lean Leadership Interviews” on his site, shmula.com. I enjoyed his most recent interview with Jeff Liker. I agree with Pete and Jeff in the assertion (shared by Mike Rother) that…
There are certainly many serious problems in healthcare. Let’s look at nursing, in particular. It’s a rewarding job, but it’s far more frustrating for nurses than it needs to be. Nurses often don’t have enough time in the day (or…
Today is the first day of the 5th annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. Follow along on Twitter with hashtag #HCSummit14 to see my tweets and thoughts from others. I will be adding updates to this post during the day, as well. These are not…
California week on the blog continues after yesterday’s post about Lean at San Francisco General Hospital. Today, I’m flying to Los Angeles to attend the 5th annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. I will be, as usual, moderating the CEO panel…
I didn’t know , until yesterday, that Toyota has an official company blog (at least for Toyota UK). Even though I’ve learned from Toyota people and many books and classes (and I’ve written books of my own), I always encourage…
In 2009, I wrote about a nurses’ union in New Brunswick that supported Lean because they realized this methodology could help reduce waiting times and improve working conditions. It’s win Yet, as part of the recent politicized Lean healthcare brew-ha-ha in…
I enjoy reading the magazine Inc. for my interests in startups and entrepreneurship. There are often examples and case studies that directly reference Lean thinking or just sound like Lean and Kaizen with another label. There were two articles in…
tl;dr: Push vs. pull in healthcare gets debated more than it needs to be. What actually matters is flow — the right care, in the right place, at the right time. Better flow means less waste, fewer delays, and better…
Next class: Boston, May 20, 2015 I was thinking yesterday about the “Lean for Knowledge Work” seminars I’m doing with Jim Benson and I was thinking that Kaizen and “Personal Kanban” are such a good combination, it’s like the old…
Next class: Boston, May 20 2015 I’m happy to be once again partnering with fellow Shingo Award recipient Jim Benson to teach our combined full-day “Lean for Knowledge Work” class. We did this together last year in Seattle and had…
Thanks everybody for reading my blog in 2013! I appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to read and participate in the discussion and I h0pe you’ll continue visiting the site in 2014… in what will be my…
TL;DR: This post revisits the origins of lean production through John Krafcik’s 1988 article, reflecting on how lean manufacturing began as an integrated management system rooted in culture, leadership, and respect for people–and why those foundations still matter more than…