Leadership isn’t about titles, charisma, or quick decisions—it’s about creating systems where people can do their best work and continuously improve. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on leadership through a Lean lens, drawing on ideas from Deming, Toyota, healthcare, and real-world management practice. The common theme: leaders shape culture, influence behavior, and own the systems that produce results—for better or worse.
TL;DR: NUMMI proved in the 1980s what healthcare is still learning today: you can’t punish your way to safety. Real improvement comes from mutual trust, system thinking, and leaders who respond to problems with curiosity–not blame. When we talk about…
TL;DR: NUMMI’s success was not driven by Lean tools alone, but by leadership behaviors that treated people as partners in quality and improvement. When you open the NUMMI Management Practices: Executive Summary–that thin, yellow-covered 1987 report preserved in the Don…
TL;DR: GE Aerospace’s annual report treats safety not as a compliance topic or a communications slogan, but as a core leadership responsibility. By putting safety first–literally first–in SQDC and embedding it into systems, structure, and incentives, the company offers a…
Ray Zinn argues that effective leadership isn’t about failing fast, but about learning from mistakes by acknowledging them quickly, fixing them early, and not repeating what already doesn’t work. I recently had the pleasure of hosting Ray Zinn on the…
News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better. This Operational Excellence Mixtape underscores a simple but often-missed point: new technologies like AI may change how quickly we generate ideas, but real improvement still depends on…
TL;DR: In 1987, GM accurately documented why NUMMI worked–and it wasn’t tools, techniques, or discipline. This internal report reveals a management system built on trust, learning, and problem-solving, and exposes how hard it is to act on insight when it…
Let’s commemorate today’s national holiday for Dr. King with a look back at my post from 2012: A Lean Lesson from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And here is a quote that should remind folks of Kaizen and continuous improvement:…
At our 2016 Kaizen Live! event at Franciscan St. Francis Health, Mischelle McMillin shared practical, honest, and refreshingly human insights on Gemba Walks that remain highly relevant today. This post explores the leadership behaviors that make Gemba Walks effective–and why…
Summary: Today’s “mixtape” post brings together timely ideas on continuous improvement, leadership, productivity, and workplace culture. From avoiding “blank slate” metrics and rethinking PDCA/PDSA debates to learning from small, human-centered improvements like the Moylan Arrow, this edition highlights practical ways…
TL;DR Twenty years later, Jeffrey Liker’s message still applies: Lean fails when it’s treated as a set of tools instead of a leadership system. Toyota’s results come from developing people, creating stability, and fostering psychological safety–not from dashboards or templates.…
TL;DR: Dr. John Toussaint says healthcare culture won’t change until leaders do–moving from “white coat leadership” (all-knowing, autocratic, blaming) to Lean leadership as facilitator, teacher, and student who learns improvement by doing it. Mark’s note (2026): I originally shared this…
TL;DR: Deciding feels like progress, and learning is what makes a solution hold. This is a working hypothesis about why executive problem solving so often skips the second part, and where I suspect it falls apart. The meeting goes well.…
