It’s possible that I could start traveling again for my healthcare consulting work next month… or maybe in July. My colleagues at Value Capture aren’t sure yet how this will work out, but clients are sharing their current plans for…
Thanks to Emily Elrod for inviting me to do a video chat webinar as part of a series that she has been running recently on “surviving quarantine by spreading life.” It was done on Thursday 5/7 at 4:30 pm ET.…
Today, I went for a brisk 50-minute walk on a sunny morning and my companion was the voice of the late Paul O’Neill as I listened to the audio from a video I’m sharing here. I listened to it and…
TL;DR: Paul O’Neill showed that safety isn’t a metric–it’s a leadership obligation, and the foundation for what he called habitual excellence. It was a sad weekend, hearing about the passing of Paul H O’Neill, Sr. on Saturday. He was 84.…
TL;DR: When staff invent workarounds to cope with shortages or failures, the real problem isn’t their behavior–it’s the system leaders allowed to fail. This blog post is a collaboration with a Lean healthcare consulting friend of mine, who heard another…
I’ve been thinking a lot about hospitals and how they’re preparing for the expected tsunami of Covid-19 patients who will need ICU beds and ventilators (when it’s expected that there won’t be enough of either). There have also been recent…
TL;DR: Pursuing zero harm isn’t about unrealistic goals or punishing people for failure. It’s a leadership choice that creates psychological safety, accelerates learning, and strengthens Lean systems. When organizations treat safety–physical, emotional, and professional–as a non-negotiable value, improvement capability follows…
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?
