A few years back, I coined a really bad acronym: L.A.M.E. One of the things it can mean is “Lean As Mistakenly Explained.” It’s inevitable to see articles about the Lean Startup methodology that fit into this category (or maybe…
You might also have seen the first video animation that I did last week about the waste of getting new recycling bins. I've created a new video that shows what a "bad office 5S" scene might look like... something that's "L.A.M.E." not Lean.
I’m in Las Vegas, speaking today to close the Lean Healthcare PowerDay event. There are many great speakers, including Dr. Richard Shannon, Dr. David Munch, and my good friend and fellow author, Naida Grunden. Click on their names to listen…
Mark’s Note: Today is another excellent post by Christina Kach. She touches on many of the misunderstandings of miscommunications about Lean in this post and you might recognize much of what she’s identified as “L.A.M.E.”, not Lean. “Lean is patient…
It’s been nice to see the “lean design” approach taking hold in healthcare over the past few years. I think the first book on the subject was a “manifesto” by an architect, David Chambers: Efficient Healthcare – Overcoming Broken Paradigms.…
I saw the following in a submission for a session at the 2012 Society for Health Systems conference, where I’m the Lean track chair. One submission said the following: “Lean efforts often succeed but do not always provide meaningful benefits”…
A note from 2026: I wrote a fuller version of this same argument recently, with more sources and a fairer look at what Six Sigma actually offers. This post stays up because the comments below are still some of the…
One of the variations of my acronym L.A.M.E. is “Lean As Misguidedly Explained,” and I recently ran across two fresh instances of this (and, for once, neither is from the Wall Street Journal!). One example is a news writer who…
TL;DR — GM vs. Toyota After the Japan Earthquake General Motors (GM) Toyota Bottom line:This wasn’t a failure of JIT or Lean. It was a leadership choice. Toyota showed that real Lean is about how you treat people when work…
Is oatmeal good for you? It generally is…. well, unless it isn’t. Oatmeal can lower your cholesterol, is full of whole grains, and on its own isn’t sweet (it doesn’t HAVE to have tons of brown sugar added in). This…
Just before the new year, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured the Lean efforts at Barnes-Jewish Hospital (“St. Louis hospital among handful using efficiency to aid patients“). I think it’s more than a “handful” of hospitals around the world using Lean…
There’s a long-standing argument that I’ve been dragged into with a group that calls itself “new systems thinkers.” They loudly criticize Lean as being altogether awful (with the alternative, predictably, being their services). One of them wrote a blog post…
