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.
I’ve had some cartoons on the blog before, including a few “Doofus & Leanies.” I can’t draw at all, believe me (although I sometimes do my own simple digital graphics). I’ve been fortunate to partner up with other artists before…
In our Healthcare Kaizen books, Joe Swartz and I have tried to make the case that the Kaizen style of continuous improvement isn’t just a nice way to treat employees… it’s smart business and it’s good for patients. It’s a practical…
What happens when a mistake is made in your organization? How do you react when an error occurs? A lab specimen gets mislabeled. The wrong product is shipped to the wrong customer. A patient is injected with the wrong medication.…
I was happy to see this article in FORTUNE’s recent issue: “Brad Smith, Intuit CEO: How To Be A Great Leader: Get Out Of The Way.” Smith (@IntuitBrad) talks about the Lean Startup concept often called “getting out of the…
At KaiNexus, Dr. Greg Jacobson and I have been doing new webinars each month (see the library here). Our most recent one was hosted by our friends and partners at Gemba Academy, so thanks to them for that and all…
PDSA, back to the days of Dr. Deming, has stood for Plan Do Study Adjust. A key point in the application of PDSA (and a key to A3 problem solving), is to avoid jumping to solutions. We Plan — and this…
Back in May, I saw news reports about the head of CNN, Jeff Zucker: “CNN boss Zucker shocked by staffer’s fearful question.” Back when I worked for big companies, I had to be an audience member for many “all hands”…
Yesterday’s post was about some of our work at KaiNexus and today’s post is hosted over on the KaiNexus Blog: Challenges to Innovation and Improvement In the post, I share some of the survey reflections that were shared with us…
In March, I wrote a post titled “Is it Lean’s Fault or the Old Management System’s?” about how people’s complains about Lean are actually often complaints about old management mindsets. Unfortunately, what’s described as “Lean” in an organization is sometimes not…
Since my wife and I moved to San Antonio just over two years ago, we’ve become big Spurs fans. Since the Spurs are the only major pro sports team here, it’s basically a civic obligation to get behind our local…
As I sometimes do, I’m going to close out a bunch of browser tabs and share some articles that caught my eye recently but don’t merit full blog posts of their own. I’m cleaning out the LeanBlog backlog and trying…
Today is the second and final day of the 5th annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. Follow along on Twitter with hashtag#HCSummit14 to see my tweets and thoughts from others. I will be adding updates to this post during the day, as well. These are…
