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.
It’s two Barrys in a row on the podcast, as my guest for Episode #335 is Barry O’Reilly and we’re talking, in depth, about his latest book, Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results. Barry is a…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Ontario is betting big on an untested hypothesis of reorganizing and consolidating healthcare operations and budgets predicting it will result in patients “seamlessly” moving through the health system. Time will tell, but the history has…
tl;dr: The Red Bead Experiment demonstrates how firing “low performers” based on arbitrary targets or rankings punishes people for system-driven variation, not individual effort. Bad metrics and poor leadership can create outcomes that look discriminatory, even when intent isn’t–highlighting why…
TL;DR: Pursuing zero harm isn’t about unrealistic goals or punishing people for failure. It’s a leadership choice that creates psychological safety, accelerates learning, and strengthens Lean systems. When organizations treat safety–physical, emotional, and professional–as a non-negotiable value, improvement capability follows…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Daily safety huddles are simple, inexpensive, and effective methods to raise and escalate patient safety risks. Start your safety huddles today with some tips from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. I get asked all the…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Why do we have to wake up patients to take vital signs every 4 hours if they are stable? Why does a patient need daily labs if there results have been stable for days? Because…
Joining me today for Episode #329 of the podcast is Mike Eisenberg, the director, editor, and producer of the film “To Err is Human,” a documentary about the incredibly important issue of patient safety. The film shares a title with the…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Too often, patient involvement in design and research is tokenist or “tick-box”, and requires burdensome processes for participation. To truly design around the patient, research needs to be person-centered. Large healthcare systems continue to consolidate and…
Mark’s Note: Today’s post is written by Ken Segel, the managing director of Value Capture, LLC. This is the first of what I hope will be many contributions from the Value Capture team. In the spirit of transparency, I should…
My guests for Episode #328 are Bette Gardner and Jeff Heil, of the company Breakthrough Learning. Bette is the creator of a fantastic simulation called “Friday Night at the ER” — which I’ve blogged about. When we recorded the webinar,…
Last week, Herb Kelleher passed away. He was the legendary founder, CEO, and Chairman of Southwest Airlines. Southwest posted a nice tribute photo of him on the front of their website and also put up a special website HonoringHerb.org. Kelleher…
Hi All – here’s a collection of the most read Mixtape links from 2018. I compiled the links with the greatest number of viewers and then organized them into some themes. Enjoy! Setting goals and developing effective and actionable KPIs is a…
