The Lean Blog Interviews Podcast explores leadership, systems, and continuous improvement through thoughtful conversations with practitioners, executives, authors, and researchers. These episodes go beyond tools to examine how organizations really improve—through better leadership behaviors, respect for people, learning from mistakes, and sound management systems. This archive brings together podcast episodes focused on Lean, healthcare, Toyota, Deming, psychological safety, and what it actually takes to sustain improvement over time.
Listen: My guest for Podcast #125 is Mike George, the founder of Strong America Now, a “nonprofit organization dedicated to mobilizing and educating citizens to support only those Presidential candidates who commit to eliminating the deficit with no new taxes.”…
What happens when a Fortune 500 CEO brings a long-term mindset and a bold commitment to safety into healthcare? In this conversation with Paul O’Neill, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and CEO of Alcoa, we explore how leadership, transparency, and aiming…
Listen: This episode is a discussion with two leaders from Group Health Cooperative, a consumer-governed, nonprofit health care system based in Seattle, Washington. My guests are Claire Trescott, MD, Primary Care Medical Director, and Alicia Eng, Vice President of Primary…
Listen: This episode is a conversation with Paul Akers, founder and president of FastCap LLC, based in Bellingham, WA. FastCap is an international product development company founded in 1997 with over 2000 distributors worldwide. Paul and FastCap have also embraced…
Listen: Today’s episode is a discussion with Mrinalini Gadkari, a Senior Lecturer at the Fisher College of Business. Today, we’re talking about the new Master of Business Operational Excellence (MBOE) for Healthcare Program starting this fall. We’ll talk about how…
Today’s episode is a chat with Jody Crane, MD, MBA and Chuck Noon, PhD. They are talking about their outstanding book The Definitive Guide to Emergency Department Operational Improvement: Employing Lean Principles with Current ED Best Practices to Create the…
Produced in partnership with the Healthcare Value Network, episode #119 is a discussion with Dean Gruner, MD, the president & CEO of ThedaCare. Here, we talk about Strategy Deployment as a Lean management system and how it fits into their ongoing management and improvement efforts in their health system.
Episode #118 is a follow-up to podcast #116 with Jim Womack, founder and former Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, now their Senior Advisor and author of the new book Gemba Walks, available in paperback, Kindle format, iBooks, and other…
TL;DR: Samuel Culbert argues that performance reviews are subjective, political, and harmful to results. Instead of judging people once a year, leaders should coach continuously and take responsibility for system performance. Episode #117 is a conversation with Prof. Samuel A.…
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, joins me to talk about how Lean principles shaped his approach to entrepreneurship, what continuous innovation actually looks like in practice, and why these ideas apply just as much inside large companies as…
Episode #114 is a conversation with John Kim, of the firm John Kim & Associates. John is a recognized leader in the Design, Development, Implementation and Deployment of Enterprise Wide Lean Transformations. As an executive at The HON Company…
Now actor Charlie Sheen has been all over the news lately, giving interviews to practically anyone with a microphone. This is the type of “news” I normally try to tune out, yet alone blog about. Somehow, he stumbled across my…
