Tag: Safety

I'm very happy that my friend and long-time colleague Meghan Scanlon, a Principal with the firm Value Capture, presented a webinar that KaiNexus and...

I'm excited that our sold-out "Symposium on Learning Organizations" group will be visiting Toyota's San Antonio plant on Wednesday. Later that day, we'll be touring the Garrison Brothers Distillery and, on Thursday, we are using their "barrel barn" as a venue for "Open Space" discussions, the Red Bead Experiment, and more. We have a group of 40 from many industries attending and we might run a similar event in a different location in the future. I've blogged about Garrison Brothers and my stint as a bottling line volunteer before... In that post, I shared pictures of me working to dip bottles of bourbon into a sealing wax. I was wearing a winter coat because it was February in Texas and there was a bit of snow and ice that week. When I was back there recently, I saw some additional improvements that seem like "Kaizen" to me. 

There's a lot to admire about Elon Musk. I admire his risk taking and his entrepreneurial spirit. I use PayPal a lot (one of his early companies) and I admire the innovation of Tesla and SpaceX. But, I question how much Musk and Tesla have been willing to learn from Toyota or people like Paul O'Neill.

There's much to admire about Toyota and even regular readers of this blog might throw the "fanboy" label at me. Toyota employees in San Antonio have a lot of positive things ("pros") to say online about working there. But, the overwhelming "con" is the rotating work schedules - being on days for two weeks then switching to nights for two weeks. Where do a priority on safety and "respect for people" enter into the discussion about which shift pattern is safest, most effective, and most fair?

Any rare event creates a number of challenges when it comes to manufacturing and supply chains. We're seeing a pretty historic "spike" in demand for products like the inexpensive glasses that allow one to safety view the eclipse (our friends in the totality zone can look at the totally-eclipsed sun safely, but that's the only time). You could call it "supply chain challenges" or a "lack of planning on my part," but I cannot find eclipse glasses anywhere. There are MANY articles online about this widespread problem -- it's been impossible to buy "eclipse glasses" anywhere. Why is this? What could have been done?

What if "easier" is less safe? Great question. It begs the question of why Safer isn't first in Shingo's list? Is it because safety is assumed to be such a fundamental pre-condition in the Toyota culture or the Lean approach? Safety is such a non-negotiable point that it doesn't need to be said?

One of the highlights of my podcasting adventures was the opportunity to interview Paul H. O'Neill back in 2011. The original episode was posted here as #124 in the series. This post a summary of our discussion.

In this post, I look at the impact (or lack thereof) of targets, rankings, and incentives, when it comes to safe driving or PCI (angioplasty) procedures in a hospital cath lab. Are we improving? How do we know? How do we improve?

In today's post, I write about James Hereford, a Lean thinker and leader who is now CEO of Fairview Health Services in Minnesota. I share some links to and highlights from a past podcast with him and other blog posts with his thoughts.

A few of you sent me this article... and you were correct to think I would be interested: "Inside Alabama's Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs." What are the parallels and lessons for hospitals?

I'm guessing most "Lean thinkers" stayed home the other day on the "Black Friday" shopping day. Why might this be? For one, I think we tend...

This article from the Toronto Star caught my eye the other day: Cyclist says his pool noodle makes Toronto streets safer for him There was a...