Lean Blog Audio: Practical Lean Thinking, Psychological Safety, and Continuous Improvement

I'm sure anybody who has done any work with Lean has heard these words said in one form or another, often prefaced with a "You don't understand..."We're different.

What did I learn about learning to eat sushi and incremental Kaizen (change for the better) during my 2014 Lean Healthcare Study Trip to Japan? Listen to find out... and learn more about our upcoming Japan trip at http://www.japanleantrip.com.

http://leanblog.org/audio71 Episode #403 of the public radio program "This American Life" originally aired in 2010, telling the story of the NUMMI plant that was a joint venture between GM and Toyota (it's now where they build Teslas). As a joint venture, that meant the closed-down GM Fremont plant was re-opened to be managed under the Toyota Production System. The This American Life story asks wh...

http://leanblog.org/audio70 How did a few episodes of HBO's "Silicon Valley" make Mark Graban think about continuous improvement and the need to avoid a "culture of fear" in an organization?

How can the NHS reduce waiting times without throwing money at the problem? Are they using Lean to increase capacity and throughput in a way that also improves quality? The recipe is "reduce waste."There's usually the need to improve three things in any industry: Quality Cost Speed Traditionally, people would say you can get it "good and cheap but not fast" or some combination of just two of those...

http://leanblog.org/audio68 Before I head out on vacation, here is a reader question that I am sharing for your input. I'm sharing this with permission and I'm obscuring a few details at their request. Please read and leave a comment below the post. My approval of comments might be a bit slow after Tuesday evening as I start to travel. The Question: I thought I'd get in touch. I have genuinely lis...

http://leanblog.org/audio67 My wife and I are getting ready to leave tomorrow night for a two week vacation, so it jogged my memory about this story I saw back in December in the WSJ: Airlines Try to Make Coach Classier. Anything that makes long flights more bearable is good news to me. One detail that caught my attention in the WSJ article was this: "Etihad is rolling out new economy features tak...

http://leanblog.org/audio66 I'm a big nerd in that I love reading newspapers basically cover to cover. I'm a nerd in many ways, I guess. You don't have to be a survey nerd to take my short reader survey (and you might win a book!).I was a pretty unusual child, reading the entire Detroit Free Press every morning before school. I was a news nerd then. I wanted to be a sportswriter, since the father...

http://leanblog.org/audio65 The Wall St Journal loves writing about how "Just In Time" (JIT) is a risky inventory strategy. See my past posts about how the WSJ is so often wrong on this. The WSJ seem to only understand Lean as JIT, as opposed to seeing Lean as a broader methodology and management system. JIT is just one component of the Toyota Production System (built-in quality being the other)....

http://leanblog.org/audio64 When I teach about Kaizen and continuous improvement, I try to use scenarios and cases to help people think through how they would respond to, coach, and collaborate on employee ideas. One key point is that leaders have to thank employees for pointing out problems or opportunities for improvement. They need to do so even if they think the idea or proposed solution isn't...

http://leanblog.org/audio63 I've been intrigued by the "Lean Startup" movement since I first saw Eric Ries speak at MIT back in late 2009. I've read his book The Lean Startup, have attended a bunch of the conferences (speaking at two of them - see video of one). I've interviewed Eric on my podcast series (listen here and here).There's a lot to learn and apply in life and at KaiNexus. I'm by no mea...

http://leanblog.org/audio62 Last week was an amazing week of learning and networking. I was in Dallas for the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (as I wrote about). As I mentioned yesterday, it was also my wife's five year reunion from her MIT master's program. As I also mentioned, I nerded out and sat in on a number of lectures that were part of the weekend. I'll also blog later about Steve Sp...

http://leanblog.org/audio61 My wife and I were in Boston over the weekend, as it was her fifth reunion from her MIT master’s program. I’m also an alum, but was considered a “guest” since I graduated 16 years ago from my program and you don’t have to have an MIT degree to know 16 divided by 5 is not an integer. Being MIT, the reunion wasn’t just about parties (an...

At this year's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (see my summary here) Dr. John Toussaint talked about and introduced his newly released book Management on the Mend, a follow up to 2010's On the Mend. Summit attendees received a copy of the book, so they're the first to have a chance to read this important work.

In American healthcare, there's a growing gap between hospitals and clinics that are being innovative and those who are stuck in the "way it's always been done" mode. For example, innovative primary care clinics are using a combination of better processes and better technology to deliver a patient experience that I wish I could experience.

Jack Dorsey is well known among tech circles, as a co-founder of Twitter (he's @Jack) and, now, as the CEO of Square. I'm a frequent Twitter user (I'm @MarkGraban) and I also utilize the Square reader occasionally to sell a book to somebody. I appreciate being able to easily and inexpensively accept a credit card here and there. This interview on the public radio program Marketplace caught my eye...

Don Davis, former CEO of Stanley Works, passed away in 2010 and left an unfinished book in progress. One of my friends (and former colleagues from Dell in the late '90s), Steve Cook and a number of other alumni completed the book, working with Don's daughter Ruthie Davis (of the eponymous shoe company).The book is Do the Right Thing: Real Life Stories of Leaders Facing Tough Choices. Do the Right...

It's not uncommon to hear statements thrown around about Lean that are more of a myth than anything resembling reality. I remember the time a professor told a group that if Toyota ran a health clinic, a buzzer would go off at the end of the planned appointment time and the patient would be kicked out of the room. That's ridiculous. That's a myth (and it's not one of the widely spoken myths). A Lea...

I love to cook and I"m the primary chef in my home. I often get asked a question - sometimes it’s serious and sometimes it’s smart-alecky - “Do you 5S your kitchen?” If by that, they mean, “Do you label the outside of your cabinets and put tape outlines around everything?” then the answer is no. And I’m not sure why anybody would want to… but if doi...

Here's my latest post for LinkedIn through their "Influencers" series. It might be old hat to readers of this blog, but I hope what I shared is useful for a wider audience that I have there.10 Key Lean Mindsets for Factories, Hospitals, Startups, and More http://leanblog.org/audio54

http://leanblog.org/audio53 In my first post about the on-site Kaizen learning experience at Franciscan St. Francis Health, an event I came to call "Kaizen Live," I wrote about some of the initial presentations and discussions from Franciscan leaders. You can also see my tweets from the days. A big part of the 1.5-day event was the three "gemba visits" that took place. Each attendee had the chance...

http://leanblog.org/audio52 There's been a back and forth of views about the state of pediatric emergency medicine recently in the Wall St Journal. Let me start first, actually, with the more recent statement, a rebuttal from Michael Gerardi M.D., FACEP, President of the American College of Emergency Physicians, in the form of a letter to the editor. He wrote: "Emergency care of children in the U....

Following up on yesterday's post on seemingly successful experiments with ACOs, here's another article, from HBR, on "safety huddles" in healthcare:"How Every Hospital Should Start the Day"

You might be considered "wonky" for enjoying the topics discussed here at LeanBlog.org... but that's fine. This is a safe environment for being wonky about Lean and improvement. From Vox.com, Sarah Kliff normally does a great job covering healthcare topics, including this latest piece: "This small, wonky Obamacare program saved $384 million over 2 years"

http://leanblog.org/audio49 I was quoted in two articles that appeared in "Today's Hospitalist":"Discharging Mr. Wood: Time to get serious about waste" and "Standardized work: Improving quality by reducing practice variation." Reducing Waste The author, David A. Frenz, MD, points out that it's a "collective delusion" that the U.S. spending so much more on healthcare leads to safer or higherquality...