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.
As I sometimes do, I’m going to close out a bunch of browser tabs (which makes my Mac run faster) and I’ll do that by sharing some articles that caught my eye but maybe don’t merit full blog posts of…
I have been going through some old papers recently and I found two sheets of paper with hand-written thoughts or “truisms” that I had scribbled down in early 2002. The word truism, it turns out, doesn’t mean “true” so much as…
View the post that inspired this “listicle.” Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a…
Listen Today’s guest is Michael Ballé, an author of many novels about Lean management, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. He joins us for this episode from Paris (he shares many photos of “Paris moments” via his Twitter account @Michael_Balle). Michael…
Tomorrow afternoon, I’m doing two different webinars that I hope you’ll want to sign up for. Even if you can’t attend live, I’d encourage you to register in advance so you can get links sent to you automatically to view these on…
For Oregon Football, Leadership Doesn’t Mean Yelling and Screaming The stereotype of a football coach is sort of like the stereotype of an Army drill sergeant — lots of yelling and screaming and getting “in your face” when a mistake…
I had planned on chilling out over the holidays by reading some books that aren’t related to Lean, Kaizen, etc. Novels are not normally my thing and I started reading How Doctors Think, which had been on my Kindle to-read list…
It’s a bit of a modern management cliché to say, “Don’t bring problems! Bring me solutions!” I think what it’s meant to mean is, “Don’t just complain! Think about improving things!” Why “Don’t Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions” Backfires…
Here’s the third cartoon collaboration with artist Carrie Schurman, CMA (AAMA), a workflow facilitator at a health system in Florida. See all of the cartoons here. More to come! This cartoon is not inspired by any particular incident or any real health…
Today, I’m traveling to Tokyo, but I’m still thinking of the amazing nurses and leaders at Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indiana. Through my co-author Joe Swartz, the director of business transformation, their work is featured heavily in our book Healthcare Kaizen.…
Back in September, I wrote about our most recent “Lean Coffee” gathering in San Antonio, where people from different healthcare organizations talked about their improvement efforts. As part of my visit to The Netherlands this week, Marc Rouppe van der…
Mark’s note: Today’s post is by David Meier, a former Toyota group leader, and co-author of the excellent books The Toyota Way Fieldbook and Toyota Talent: Developing Your People the Toyota Way. He is currently working on a project to…
