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.
Mark’s Note: I’ve known Ryan McCormack for many years now, thanks to his previous work in Lean healthcare and his attendance at Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit events. He’s been sending out an excellent curated email on Operational Excellence. You can…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Healthcare is the world’s largest cottage industry, as evidenced by the enormous variation in practice. Healthcare practitioners may finally be ready to acknowledge that reducing variation is important to improving patient safety and outcomes according…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Hospitals have been collecting patient complaint data for decades, but leveraging the data for improvement has remained elusive. Some new publications show how using a big data approach for patient complaint data can help identify…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients The benefits of Electronic healthcare records are a polarizing topic with healthcare providers. Standardization and electronic workflows have their upsides, but many are developed to optimize billing and payments, and are not designed with…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient A lot can be done to optimize flow in hospitals without investing in additional staff and infrastructure by using an operations research approach. Here’s an example from Ottawa. Patient interviews can be uncomfortable, and it…
Tomislav Mihaljevic, MD was named CEO of the Cleveland Clinic just over a year ago, replacing long-time CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD.
As I've blogged about (and podcasted about), I've been impressed with the Cleveland Clinic Improvement Model and their approach to continuous improvement, problem solving, and Lean management.
Dr. Mihaljevic has written a blog post about the power of "tiered huddles"...
This article from the WSJ caught my eye last week (might be behind their paywall):
The Best Bosses Are Humble Bosses
Organizations are making a push to hire and promote workers who lead effectively but don't seek the spotlight
In today's post, I share some thoughts and related reading...
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient CMAJ summarizes how to improve the quality of healthcare in Canada. Nothing new here, which begs the question – what are we waiting for? Intermountain Health in Utah has a reputation for creating value for…
Jet lag, even well managed and planned for, meant I was awake early on a Sunday morning. Over breakfast, I read more about news from last week, that GE had fired their CEO John Flannery after 14 months and replaced him with a relatively new board member, Larry Culp.
Culp is GE's first outsider CEO hire in their 100+ year history. So who is this guy and why did they hire him?
Culp was CEO of Danaher, a company that's quite often held up as the best non-Toyota Lean company out there. And they're an American company. Danaher, through its Danaher Business System (DBS) approach, uses Lean as a business strategy in a way that's very different than Toyota. Danaher has acquired companies and brought DBS and Lean in as a way to turn around and improve those businesses.
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 few years. Virginia Mason has been improving value-based care for 17 years and it continues to…
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient The legendary quality leader W. Edwards Deming is widely known for his thoughts on statistics and systems. However, Deming believed that psychology was of crucial importance when improving organizational performance. The Institute for Improvement in Healthcare shares…
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 health, partly due to its fragmented nature and reliance on academic and government echo-chambers to…
