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

Blog post tl;dr summary: Karyn Ross enlightened me about World Kindness Day and provided invaluable feedback on my book,  The Mistakes That Make U s . Her insights particularly helped me replace the term “grace” with “kindness,” enhancing the book's inclusivity. She also helped me better distinguish between being “nice” and “kind.”

Blog post A Question -- Email From a Listener: But I was prompted to think about this recently when I received an email from a podcast listener: " So I heard an interesting distinction between Gemba and Genba today. The M version is a place of work The N version is a place of investigation (used by Japanese police). So you go to the place of work before you go to the place of investigation .&...

The episode's blog post Leaders and organizations have a choice: 1) cultivate a culture of fear and punishment or 2) a culture of learning and innovation. That choice significantly affects happiness and performance at all levels within the organization. A culture of fear and punishment drives mistakes underground. An organization with a culture of fear cannot learn from mistakes because people...

Read the blog post In this episode, Mark recounts an unexpected ordeal in an Italian hospital after his mother-in-law broke her arm while on vacation. Faced with difficult choices about surgery and travel, the family navigates a foreign healthcare system. Amid the stress, a seemingly small act of kindness by a hospital staff member leaves a lasting impression, exemplifying universal compassion.

Direct blog post link It’s not unusual to see individuals get blamed for systemic errors and problems. Case in point, this article: Delta Air Flight Attendant Makes Expensive Mistake After Emergency Slide is Accidentally Deployed Shortly After Landing in Dublin It seems like a fact that the flight attendant deployed the slide. But is the mistake their fault?

To read the article and comment, click here or leanblog.org/audio340 . This is an article that I wrote, published on the Quality Digest website. It begins: "I can’t count how many times during the past 20 years I’ve heard executives complain that their people aren’t enthusiastically participating in their lean program. Leaders lament that while the company has spent a small fortune to put eve...

Blog Post I was very excited to learn about an event that is being produced by GE, next Wednesday, September 6th, in New York City. I'm thrilled to have been invited to attend in person, along with other "Lean Influencers," including my friends Katie Anderson and Jamie V. Parker . We will be fortunate to be there in person to share highlights from the event via social media, blog pos...

Blog post From the post: This is really hard to write, as I was stunned and saddened by the recent passing of a good friend and colleague, Chris Burnham. Word had started to spread on LinkedIn and I feel bad about having to share this news here. You can read his obituary here: There will be a celebration of life event on Sunday that I will be fortunate to attend. Chris was, most recently, the Seni...

Blog post When you do work related to processes, quality, improvement, and learning from mistakes… the universe has ways of testing you (or playing a prank on me). As I share at the end of the post, I failed that test in one way. A big way. My wife and I had a 3-piece sectional couch that we've recently replaced, so we were looking to donate the old one to a good cause.

Blog post This is something from my book,  The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation , that I  shared on LinkedIn recently . Here's something I figured out thanks to education in a combination of fields, including Lean management and  psychological safety . I wish I had understood this much sooner: “Speaking up isn't a matter of character or courage–it&#39...

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Blog post This post shares a story I heard at the Michigan Lean Consortium annual conference earlier this week. They've been kind about sharing ideas and doing a book club discussion around my new book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation . During a book signing session at the conference, an attendee, Cori, told me a story that's too good to not pass...

Blog post page Below is some material that I wrote, but didn't use, in my book The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation . Maybe it was a mistake to cut it. But the material wasn't really related to my podcast. It was based on some interactions with some Veterans Administration Health Care leaders after giving a talk on learning from mistakes last November...

Blog post with photos and more I was saddened to learn today that Masaaki Imai passed away, as announced this week by the organization he founded, KAIZEN Institute. He was 92. Mr. Imai was well known for his books, including KAIZEN , his follow up Gemba Kaizen , and his latest, Strategic KAIZEN™ (published in 2021). He traveled the world teaching people about continuous improvement. I'd like t...

Read the blog post and get links My new book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation , is still only in a draft state before final proofreading (actually, the proofreading is taking place now). Trying to get some proof copies printed by Amazon sure does open up the possibility of mistakenly hitting "Publish Your Paperback Book" instead of "Save a...

Blog post link The following material was found on the “cutting room floor” for my upcoming book,  The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation .  And I've supplemented it with some new material to flesh it out into a post. Come to the  live book cover reveal event tomorrow  (Tuesday, May 2) if you can! I've asked more than 215 people the same question (relea...

Link to the blog post at Value Capture's website As we explore concepts like psychological safety and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) in this blog post series, I’d like to kick things off with a look at some serious problem statements that we must address. I’m thankful for the organizations, including Value Capture clients, who aim to close these performance gaps in syst...

Episode page and blog post If you're interested in my upcoming book (available June XX, date TBD),  The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation , the Kindle edition is available to be  pre-ordered now through Amazon ! The date is set as June 27th, but it will likely be available sooner. Amazon (and their KDP platform) make it easier to pull a date forward… and t...

Blog post for this episode Here's another  reader question , this one received from The Netherlands, a country I have loved visiting over the past eight years (see  my blog posts about the country and Lean healthcare efforts there ). Here is the question, in part: Your work has been an inspiration here, so I started to research the origin and dissemination of lean in healthcare in the USA. You...

Blog post for the episode I'm happy to announce that I've finished the manuscript for my upcoming book (a real one, not an April Fool's Joke). The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation It's taken about a year from saying, “I'm going to write a book based on the My Favorite Mistake podcast” to completing the book writing.

Blog post including a link to buy the book Tomorrow is the 4th anniversary of the paperback release of my book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More. Long story short, I'm running a limited-time sale to celebrate. Looking back to the release, I took an odd approach, perhaps, in that the eBook and Kindle version were available first, in August 2018, I think. I wanted to tes...

Blog post   This article caught my eye today, and it's a change of pace to think about and write about mistakes other than my own (and I made more today — but healthcare mistakes are more important). Penn Medicine hospital cited over wrong-site surgery It's a mistake to perform surgery on the wrong leg. Not an “unintended mistake” (which is redundant). All mistakes are unintentional. Inten...

Read the post for this episode Following up on my blog post about GE CEO Larry Culp's AME keynote speech , I wanted to share some of the discussion from his "fireside chat, absent the fire" (as Larry called it) with Katie Anderson (as we discussed in our podcast episode ).

Blog post It was a real treat to hear Larry Culp, the CEO of General Electric and CEO of GE Aerospace, speak at the AME 2022 annual conference in Dallas. He recently reached the four-year mark of his tenure as GE's first-ever outsider CEO ( read the 4-year update that Larry posted on LinkedIn ). Below are some highlights and quotes from his 15-minute remarks, along with some of my commentary and t...

Blog post  A culture of learning makes the difference, not "low inventory" Last year, I wrote a post that criticized those, including the Wall St Journal, who claimed that Toyota was "abandoning" the Toyota Production System or that strategically adding some inventory meant they were moving away from "Just in Time" approaches: Toyota leaders, including my friend Jamie Bonini , were quoted in...