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

My favorite book, as I've written about before, is not a "Lean book" -- it's Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler, PhD. It might look like a book about statistics... http://www.leanblog.org/audio170

I'm extremely honored that The W. Edwards Deming Institute published my first blog post in a series of three that I've written for them, to be published over the next month or so. The post is titled: "Why Dr. Deming's Work is So Important to Me" http://www.leanblog.org/audio169

Before Christmas, I was listening to the Dan Le Batard Show and their guest for the day was former NFL player Domonique Foxworth, pictured at left. Foxworth earned an MBA from Harvard Business School after his playing days. He's the perfect participant in a smart show about sports and whatever. During one segment, they all talked about NFL offensive and defensive coordinators and how they often fa...

I had a chance to visit one of their community hospitals, Hillcrest Hospital, as well as the main campus. It was a very stimulating visit and it was great to see the progress they were making in building a "culture of improvement." http://www.leanblog.org/audio167

"Making mistakes is better than faking perfection."I saw this quote the other day and tweeted it. It seemed like food for thought and something to reflect on for a new year. A Google search doesn’t lead to a clear creator of this quote… it’s a common thought that has been around a long time, I guess.

http://www.leanblog.org/audio165 I get annoyed by corporate euphemisms, such as referring to people as "resources," the term "right-sizing" for layoffs, and the type of jargon and babble parodied in the Weird Al song "Mission Statement."Using unclear language can intentionally mask and hide reality, or sometimes it's just another form of incompetence. You might know about the recent Wells Fargo sc...

It's a bit of a modern management cliché to say "Don't bring problems! Bring me solutions!" I think what that means is "Don't just complain! Think about improving things!" It's good to think about improvement, but sometimes (if not often!) that improvement process starts by identifying problems. In a "Kaizen" process in a team, I encourage people to bring problems forward even if they do NO...

I first blogged about this article back in 2009 and it's still online:"Keen to Be Lean" The sub headline talks about hospitals being "desperate to cut costs." Has that changed? I wish the motivation was more often about hospitals being "desperate to improve patient safety and quality." Lean can address that too and should be mentioned, even in a publication for CFOs.

http://www.leanblog.org/audio162 Dr. W. Edwards Deming used to warn against replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards and incentives. Brian Joiner (author of Fourth Generation Management), who worked with Deming, warned that setting targets and quotas can lead to three things: improving the system, distorting the system, or distorting the numbers. It’s often easier to distort the...

I was happy to see an engineer (Chemical Engineering) and a General Motors leader, Alicia Boler Davis, on the cover of the Northwestern University alumni magazine. See this profile and story: "DRIVING GM" http://www.leanblog.org/audio161

In the Lean approach, we don't call people idiots or dummies. We don't say, or shouldn't say, things like "idiot proofing" or "dummy proofing."There's an old Toyota story about how the term "fool proofing" upset an employee, they switched to using the equivalent of "mistake proofing" or "error proofing." Read more about the story in a comment on an old blog post of mine. Terms like mistake proofin...

http://www.leanblog.org/audio159 I do a lot of work across the U.S., but I've also been very fortunate to work with hospitals, clinics, and health systems around the world over the past 11 years. It started with a few trips to Canada to conduct some hospital lab assessments and Lean leadership training when I worked for a J&hospital consulting group. Then, came an opportunity to spend about ei...

A few weeks ago, I saw this announcement about Dean Gruner, MD, the second CEO to lead ThedaCare during their Lean journey:Dr. Dean Gruner, ThedaCare President and CEO, Announces Retirement "Dean Gruner, MD, president and CEO of ThedaCare since April 2008, today announced his plans to retire. Dr. Gruner began in healthcare 40 years ago, has served this community for 33 years, and has served as Pre...

I was happy to see this announcement the other day:UCSF to Train Residents in Lean Management and Process Improvement From the announcement: “UC San Francisco will train medical residents and fellows in Lean management principles, as part of a broader institutional commitment to continuous quality improvement. The effort is being supported inpart with a grant from the Accreditation Council f...

You might remember the hubbub (a kerfuffle?) over the NEJM opinion piece written by Dr. Jerome Groopman and Dr. Pamela Hartzband. See my first post about their article. There are more links at the bottom of this postNow, the "Perspective" section of the New England Journal of Medicine has published a piece titled "The Hard Work of Health Care Transformation" by Dr. Richard Bohmer. Check it out. Dr...

More notes and discussion about my trip to China. http://leanblog.org/audio155

http://leanblog.org/audio154 Continuing from Part 1 of my post about my first day of my first China trip, I'd like to share more about the Lean healthcare conference and presentations that took place. In the next presentation from a Chinese hospital, the speaker started talking about the need to "improve [patient and employee] satisfaction through Lean management" and that "we have the same goals...

Audio courtesy of Quality Digest Live -- see www. QualityDigest.com for more info and http://www.leanblog.org/audio153 for the link to the article referenced.

We'll probably also talk about this article that was published yesterday on QualityDigest.com:"Lean Is About Quality, Not Just Speed or Efficiency... in Factories or in Hospitals" It might ruffle some feathers, but oh well. I'll stand by what I say here as factual, not just opinion: http://leanblog.org/audio152

My first trip to China... http://leanblog.org/audio151

http://leanblog.org/audio150 Thanks to those of you who pre-ordered the 3rd edition of my book Lean Hospitals. Click below to read a free preview from the book, the start of the chapter on leading and engaging employees (arguably, it's all about leadership). Improving the Way We Manage [Preview of "Lean Hospitals" 3rd Ed.] And if you post a comment sharing some of your reflections on your Lean jou...

For decades, manufacturers have been tripped up by the simplistic idea that Lean is about "zero inventories." It probably didn't help that one of the earliest and most prominent books about what many used to call "Japanese manufacturing practices" had that exact title: Zero Inventories. It was published in 1983, well before "Lean" was a term used for this. Not even Toyota has zero inventories. The...

Thanks to this post by Bruce Hamilton (aka "Toast Guy" or "Old Lean Dude"), I was reminded of the old General Motors effort, spearheaded by then-CEO Roger Smith (of "Roger&Me" fame), to fully automate car factories. Their concept was the "lights-out factory" that could run without people (other than a security guard).GM invested $90 BILLION dollars over 10 years in this quixotic (if not foolha...

The 1994 book Why TQM Fails And What to Do About It is a book that could be very relevant today, in the context of Lean. I'll give credit to Greg Jacobson, MD from KaiNexus who had a copy of this book on his shelf. I bought a copy and have recently been reading it because I was curious to see if there parallels to be found with Lean failures. http://leanblog.org/audio147

http://leanblog.org/audio146 Earlier this year, we had rantings from two doctors about Lean in the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine... except what they described didn't really sound like Lean (as I wrote about here and here - and also see Dr. John Toussaint's rebuttal).Now, there's a story written by an emergency medicine physician, Dr. Brad Cotton, that appears in a publication called "Em...