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.
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…
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 world where consumers expect total transparency and availability of data. Canadian doctors agree that patients should have…
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 Ryan via email. Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient Not surprisingly, healthcare organizations with poor cultures of rigid…
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