Tag: PDSA

Joining me today for Episode #312 of the podcast is Jeff Hunter, author of the excellent book "Patient-Centered Strategy: A Learning System for Better Care." Jeff was with the ThedaCare in Wisconsin, where he was Senior Vice President, Strategy and Marketing for the health system. After retiring from ThedaCare, he has been a faculty member for Catalysis and has started his own consulting firm, Jeff Hunter Strategy. In today's podcast, we discuss a number of topics, including how a good strategy is a necessary input for a "strategy deployment" management process, some of the problems with traditional approaches to strategic planning, and why an iterative PDSA approach works better than static plans.

I first learned about an approach to personal development called "The Harada Method" when Norman Bodek co-authored a book with Takashi Harada: The Harada Method: The Spirit of Self-Reliance. Norman was a guest on my podcast in 2013 to talk about this... The Harada Method has been on mind again recently thanks to the success of Major League Baseball player Shohei Ohtani, from Japan.

I do my best to practice what I preach. I'm not perfect, by any means, but I'm pretty good about practicing the "Kaizen" style of continuous improvement. In this post, I share three recent examples of my Kaizen efforts for LeanBlog.org, JapanLeanTrip.com, and LeanHospitalsBook.com.

it's great to see an 11 year old thinking like an engineer and an entrepreneur. He's the son of a Toyota "operational excellence" consultant. For those who try to unfortunately equate Lean to a "clean desk policy," the father's desk is a great argument against banning family photos and an illustration of why Lean isn't about putting tape around everything...

As Eric wrote about in The Lean Startup (and as many others say), time is the most precious commodity anybody has. I think that's true in startups and it's true in other organizations. Everybody says they don't have enough time. So, we have to use it wisely.

Today at 3 PM, I'm doing a webinar at the invitation of the BC Patient Safety & Quality Council, as part of their "Quality Café" series. Thanks for the invitation! It's open to the public and it's titled: "Standardize What Makes Sense... Then Engage Everybody in Improving What You Standardized" I hope you can join us...

This recent tweet of mine struck a nerve, apparently, based on the number of times it was liked and retweeted -- "Heard often: "We don't have time for improvement." Heard never: "We don't have time for fire fighting."

Mark's note: Today's post is by Cristal Totterman, a pharmacist and Lean leader I have known for a couple of years now. She's written a post that made me think about and reflect on the never-ending journey of improvement, both as individuals and organizations.

In today's post, I write about how Kaizen starts with you. I share some examples of "personal Kaizen," including the way I've streamlined my call scheduling process, for my benefit and for others.

Are there parallels between medicine and organizations when we look at the tension between heroism and the sometimes boring work of preventing problems and improving things? I comment on an article by Dr. Atul Gawande…

You might remember the hubbub (a kerfuffle?) over the NEJM opinion piece written by Dr. Jerome Groopman and Dr. Pamela Hartzband. See my first post...

After the previous CEO of JC Penney, Ron Johnson, was fired (see my post "Lack of PDSA made JCP CEO SOL?"), it seems that...