Tag: Leadership

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patient Creating value for patients isn't a "project".  Lean thinking isn't a program you "implement" in a hospital over a...

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patient The legendary quality leader W. Edwards Deming is widely known for his thoughts on statistics and systems.  However, Deming...

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patient Canadian healthcare is where "pilot projects come to die".  There is a lack of a culture of innovation in Canadian...

Mark's Note: I asked my firiend Sam Selay to write a blog post on this topic after some private discussions that we had. He agreed and shared this post. I've talked to many others who have run into similar roadblocks and frustrations when trying, with the best of intentions, to bring their Lean skills and experience into healthcare. Sam was one of the contributing authors to the anthology "Practicing Lean," which is now available through Apple iBooks, in addition to Amazon (Kindle and paperback), and Leanpub (eBook and audiobook). Here is his post: In June, I was informed by my employer that the company had decided to go in a new direction. They said they would now build lean into their processes and enable process owners to be responsible for all continuous improvement functions. To date, I don’t know many organizations that have been able to successfully embed lean into everyone’s work and sustain it.

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patient Canadian healthcare is still mired in a system of outdated technology (including reliance on faxing and pagers) in a...

Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this... there's always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Subscribe to get these directly from...

My guest for Episode 311 is Jess Orr, a continuous improvement practitioner at WestRock, a large paper and packaging company, where she helps plants foster a culture of continuous improvement and employee engagement. \Her experience includes working directly for Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky. She is particularly passionate about sharing best practices across industries, which motivated her to found Yokoten Learning. In today's episode, we talk about her path from Six Sigma Black Belt to a Lean-thinking engineer at Toyota. How did she progress from solving problems herself to developing others? We'll talk about a blog post that she wrote for this blog earlier this year, Lean and ROI, leadership and culture, and much more. What is it like working outside of Toyota again? I hope you enjoy the discussion.

Joining me again for Episode 310 is Stephen M. Shortell Ph.D., MPH, MBA. He is Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professorship, HPM and is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.  He was previously a guest on Episode 267 talking about the establishment of the Center for Lean Engagement and Research (CLEAR) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the director.  In this episode, we talk about some initial research that they released in a paper that was published in The Joint Commision Journal on Quality and Patient Safety: "Use of Lean and Related Transformational Performance Improvement Systems in Hospitals in the United States: Results From a National Survey"

We have two free webinars coming up in the next week, hosted by KaiNexus. I hope you can join us. Oh, as a reminder, I'm doing a Measures of Success webinar this Friday, the 22nd. The webinars are: The Lowdown on A3 Software [Demo] How to Ease the Pain of Change

Today is one of those days where I think, "Forget what I have to say, read this...." This being a LinkedIn post written by James Hereford, the CEO of Fairview Health Services in Minnesota. "How huddles help us lead" I think the "us" says a lot, instead of a headline about "How huddles help ME lead."

For a long time, I've been an advocate for the parallels between Lean and an approach called "Just Culture." See previous blog posts on this topic. Here's a good overview of Just Culture, which says, in part: "A just culture recognizes that individual practitioners should not be held accountable for system failings over which they have no control. A just culture also recognizes that many individual or active errors represent predictable interactions between human operators and the system in which they work. However, in contrast to a culture that touts no blame as its governing principle, a just culture does not tolerate conscious disregard of clear risks to patients or gross misconduct, such as falsifying a record, performing professional duties while intoxicated, etc."

The first thing that prompted me to write this post is an interesting article about Toyota and their Georgetown, Kentucky plant that's known as TMMK (via Ward's Auto): "New Lexus Big Test for Toyota’s Georgetown Plant and Its New Manager" How does their approach and mindset seem to differ from Tesla?