After arriving at the hotel in Beijing at about 8 pm the night before, I participated in a day-long Lean Healthcare conference that very next morning. I’m glad I always presented in the mornings because I was always fresh (I…
Yesterday, I wrote Part 1 of this post on the Cleveland Clinic Improvement Model. Part 1 covered the left hand half of the model, with Organizational Alignment and Visual Management being the key themes. Once you have alignment, measures, and…
Mark’s note: Today’s post is a guest post by my friend and colleague Isaac Mitchell. We’ve crossed paths at conferences, including the annual Society for Health Systems conference, where he shared some of their great work on Kaizen that’s being…
Out there in the Lean and quality improvement communities, you sometimes hear some silly things. Sometimes, I want to attach the “Lean As Mistakenly Explained” (or L.A.M.E.) label to what’s said when it really seems off the mark from what…
QHSE Focus, an iPad magazine, asked me to contribute a piece on Lean healthcare. They published my piece titled, “Employee & Patient Safety: The Only Moral Place to Start with Lean in Healthcare.” You can read a PDF of the…
Mark’s note: Yes, I’m still on vacation. I’m very thankful for my cadre of guest bloggers, including today’s guest, Jeff Hajek. Jeff is an active blogger at his site “Gotta Go Lean” and he is the author of the book…
Mark’s note: I consider myself very fortunate to have met Patrick Anderson during my journeys in the Lean world. Patrick is the executive director of Chugachmiut, a non-profit corporation to advance the overall economic, social and cultural development of the…
Mark’s Note: Today’s guest post comes from Mark Hamel, a recent recipient of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award for his book Kaizen Event Fieldbook: Foundation, Framework, and Standard Work for Effective Events. Mark has been blogging at his…
Unlike Thursday’s joke, this is real. It’s a video posted by the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), featuring a full-time Lean professional, a “kaizen facilitator,” who is in the third year of coaching a youth (teenagers) hockey team in Ontario.…
Jim Womack visited Lantech, a manufacturer of stretch wrappers and other packaging equipment. While there and visiting the “gemba,” Jim was interviewed about Lean, what he saw at Lantech, and Toyota’s recent problems. You can see the interview here, in…
