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.
Paul Levy, the former CEO of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is a long time friend of mine and this blog (read his ongoing blog here although he’s no longer “Running a Hospital”). I’ve been meaning to blog about…
Last week, my dad pointed out this grammar quiz on the Wall Street Journal website (as part of the article “This Embarrasses You and I*: Grammar Gaffes Invade the Office in an Age of Informal Email, Texting and Twitter.” We…
As I’ve heard people say, Lean management isn’t necessarily complicated – it’s just very different. In an organization that is undergoing a “Lean transformation,” leaders need to shift from being controlling to: Coaching Coordinating Collaborating Challenging Caring Are your leaders…
Dr. W. Edwards Deming famously said that managers can’t hope to motivate employees, as they can only hope to not demotivate them. I wrote about this in my post “If management stopped demotivating their employees…” Deming had a chart that…
Here’s a great video of Paul O’Neill, former CEO of Alcoa and former U.S. Treasury Secretary, talking to healthcare leaders about their leadership role in improving quality and patient safety. You can listen to my earlier podcast with him here.…
Every few years, we see news articles about virtual reality robots that will roam hospital hallways – delivering medicines or supplies or allowing remote physicians to examine and communicate with patients in far-off locales who might not otherwise get to…
In this month’s “ASQ Influential Voices” series, ASQ President Paul Borawski asked, “How Do You “Sell” Quality?,” particularly to senior execs and CEOs. Paul asks how we convince senior leaders that quality is essential to long term performance. Through my…
Since the webinar I’m doing later today for Gemba Academy (Using SPC to Make Better Management Decisions) allows me to cite the late great Dr. W. Edwards Deming when talking about variation in systems, I thought I’d share this silly…
March 4 to 10 has been “Patient Safety Awareness Week” from the National Patient Safety Foundation. I’m certainly in favor of patient safety and have worked tirelessly, as have others, to try to improve patient safety from its abysmal starting…
It was a very pleasant surprise that ASQ chose Ari Weizweig, a founder and CEO of Zingerman’s Deli (and other businesses) in Ann Arbor, to be the opening keynote speaker at the recent ASQ Lean & Six Sigma Conference in…
Last Thursday’s Journal had a story titled “How to Be a Better Boss? Spend Time on the Front Lines.” The article talks about senior leaders going to see work being done at the front lines. Does this have to be…
Regular readers know I started my career at General Motors from 1995 to 1997. After graduate school at MIT, I took a job at Dell, Inc. in 1999. At the time, Dell was at the peak of its reputation in…
