Tag: Podcast

Joining me for the fourth time, here for Episode #326 of the podcast, is my friend and colleague Katie Anderson, a leadership coach, Lean consultant, speaker and writer from the San Francisco area. Hear our previous podcasts about visiting and living in Japan. Today, we're talking about a number of topics related to learning and collaboration: Her upcoming book with Isao Yoshino, the local San Francisco Bay area AME consortium that she is leading, her next trip to Japan (which you can join), and more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as we did.

Our anthology book Practicing Lean has raised more than $4,000 for the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation. The book has been available as an eBook, a paperback, and an audiobook. Now that it has been available for a while and sales have slowed, I thought it might help promote the book (and the good cause it supports) to make the audiobook chapters available, over time, as a podcast.

Joining me for Episode #325 of the podcast is Andrea Hardaway, an operational leader and the executive director of the Association for Vocal Disorders. Andrea and I first crossed paths through LinkedIn, seeing what she shares there and vice versa. We also had a chance to visit a hospital together in Florida last year to learn about their Lean improvement work. We have enough professional interests in common, I thought it made sense to record a conversation and share it here with the listeners. Andrea has worked in manufacturing, healthcare, and other parts of the service sector and has seen common themes across industries. This includes the opportunity to better use metrics in a way that resonates with staff and is connected to improvement work, something I'm also very interested in. So, we talk about that and more in this episode.

I first met Davis Balestracci at a conference a few years back, where I heard him give a very spirited and insightful presentation. That's why I'm happy to have him as my guest for Episode #323 of the podcast. We'll talk about a range of topics, including some of the key lessons that you'll find in his book (as a much deeper dive than we can get into here) Data Sanity: A Quantum Leap to Unprecedented Results (2nd edition). Davis has been a long-time columnist for Quality Digest, and you'll hear his thoughts on Process Behavior Charts, W. Edwards Deming, Lean Six Sigma, and more.

Today's podcast is a departure from the usual interview format. As I blogged about last week, the Lean community has lost a young, thoughtful, inquisitive, and reflective member -- Samuel Selay. I regret not having Sam on the podcast to talk about our learning and reflections. He was a guest of Ron Pereira's on the Gemba Academy podcast in 2016, talking about Lean in the Department of Defense. Today, I'm doing a reading of a blog post that Sam wrote for this site back in August. I'm also sharing the audiobook version of his chapter from the book Practicing Lean (which is read by our audiobook narrator). It's not his voice, but it's his words and thoughts. As the Marines say (Sam was an active duty Marine for 13 years), Semper Fi.  There is a GoFundMe page that was set up by Sam's sister-in-law to provide financial support to the family — his wife and four children under 18. I've donated and I hope you might consider doing the same. 

My guest for episode #321 of the podcast is Mark Hamel, He is a partner and COO with The Murli Group. Mark is a two-time recipient of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award for his books The Kaizen Event Fieldbook and his most recent book Lean Math, the reason we got together for this episode (although we talked about other things too). I hope you enjoy the discussion, which is about people as much as it is about math.

Skip Steward, the Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care in Tennessee, was a guest on Episode #314 of the podcast talking about TWI and Toyota Kata in healthcare (he was joined by Brandon Brown). Today, I've asked Skip to come back and chat 1x1, in Episode #320, about his experience with Don Wheeler, learning from W. Edwards Deming, and more. I hope you enjoy his reflections, our discussions about healthcare, and connections to my book Measures of Success (Skip undoubtedly has a book in him too). 

My guest for Episode #319 is Karen Martin, whose most recent book is Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance. She was previously a guest on Episodes #151, #190, and #285. Karen is an author of many books on Lean, quality, and performance excellence. She is also a speaker and a consultant with a B.S. in Microbiology from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. in Education from California State University, Bakersfield. Read her full bio. What is clarity? How can we work toward creating less fog and more clarity in organizations? We'll talk about that, along with a bit of discussion about clarity in metrics, as I write about in my book Measures of Success.

Joining me from Sweden for Episode 318 of the podcast is Marcus Hammarberg, author of the fascinating book Salvation: The Bungsu Story: How Lean and Kanban saved a small hospital in Indonesia. Twice. And can help you reshape work in your company. Marcus is a software developer, consultant, lean/agile coach, speaker, and author. He ended up with an opportunity to work with a hospital in Indonesia and he tells that compelling story in the book. How did a huge hole in the roof help trigger a change in culture and results? You'll hear about that and more in this episode. I hope you enjoy it and find it inspirational, as I did.

My guest for Episode #317 of the podcast is Patricia Morrill, a speaker, trainer, consultant, researcher, and author of the book The Perils of Un-Coordinated Healthcare: A Strategic Approach toward Eliminating Preventable Harm. With 30 years of experience in the healthcare industry, she has focused on blending operational efficiencies with healing environments. Patricia has successfully integrated Lean and Project Management methodologies with organizational strategic goals to build roadmaps for execution. Check out her website and her blog. In today's episode, we discuss her personal story about her mother's death that came as the result of a preventable medical error. What can be done to prevent medical errors, harm, and death?

oday's episode is the second time that friend and podcast guest Jamie Flinchbaugh has turned the tables by playing host to interview me about my new book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, which has recently been the #1 best selling book in Amazon's Total Quality Management category. Jamie is very knowledgeable on these topics, so he was a great person to interview me and to have more of a conversation about choosing the right metrics and then managing them the right way. I hope you enjoy the conversation and future podcasts will return to the usual format where I interview guests and try to let them do most of the talking.

Why do people fear change? Why are adults afraid of talking about their fears? My guest today is eminently qualified to answer such questions and to provide advice that can help us. My guest for Episode #315 is Robert Maurer, Ph.D., author of the outstanding book Mastering Fear. Bob was previously my guest for Episode #153, where we discussed one of his earlier books on Kaizen, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. By the way, earlier this year I noticed that his other book The Spirit of Kaizen was one of the few books by an American author that Toyota was selling at the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology in Nagoya (see photo below). I hope you enjoy today's discussion on Mastering Fear. As the subtitle says, can we "harness emotion to achieve excellence in health, work, and relationships"?