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

Yesterday's blog post was about a situation (with my podcast hosting service) that triggered memories of my time at General Motors in 1995. Today's post is about a recent article on Boeing that definitely caused me to think of that broken, dysfunctional “pre-Lean” culture that I suffered through (and learned from) in my first year at GM. In 1995, nobody claimed GM was Lean so the expectations were...

Episode #270 Ever since I started podcasting in 2006 , I've been using a company called “Hipcast” to be the “hosting” company for the podcast audio files and feeds. For those of you not familiar with podcasting, that's the website where I upload podcast audio files… and they then serve those files when requested by services like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This has been an aggravating week or so, s...

Is "Kaizen" a Slogan or a Methodology for the Seattle Mariners? Here is an interesting article that a few people pointed me toward the other day about the Seattle Mariners team: Mariners Sunday mailbag: Explaining the Japanese origin of the team's new slogan “Manager Scott Servais does have a mantra each year for the team, which is supposed to serve as a reminder of their purpose and responsibilit...

Today, I'm writing about another view, from an article co-authored by our friend Dr. John Toussaint and the CEO of ZSFGH, Dr. Susan Ehrlich: Changing Leadership Behavior Gets Real Results As I blogged about yesterday, new leadership behaviors (sometimes as the result of getting a new leader) can make a huge difference for an organization — this was true during my time at General Motors and I've se...

Today, I'm reading the latest issue of Health Leaders magazine (March/April 2019) whose cover features a number of stories about nursing retention. The lead article shares some data about recruitment and retention. The article says that 17% of “newly licensed RNs” leave their first nursing job “within the first year.” 33% leave within two years. Instead of blaming nurses for leaving, better organi...

Here's an interesting recent article from the Wall Street Journal (you might require a subscription to read it): The Economy's Last Best Hope: Superstar Middle Managers Anemic growth, millennial malaise, you name it–blame a lack of inspiring bosses I'll comment first that organizations that have high aspirations of “Lean Transformation” need to have “transformational leaders.” Sadly, those transfo...

Lean Should be the Solution to Hospital Overwork or Understaffing

When I had the chance to go back to Japan last October with Honsha, there was a big focus on what the former Toyota people kept referring to as "a development company." The meaning was that Toyota (and companies with similar performance) focus first and foremost on developing people.

Value is Defined by the Customer (and not all Customers are the Same) http://www.leanblog.org/audio263 It's said in the Lean methodology that “value is defined by the customer.” Value can be defined as, in most cases, “Something the customer is willing to pay for.” In healthcare, this gets complicated when patients aren't the ones paying and when patients need care instead of wanting it.

For Big Leaps With New Year’s Resolutions, Start With Baby Steps Thanks to the Lean Enterprise Institute for publishing my article about Kaizen, new habits, and New Year's resolutions: Take Baby Steps Towards Improvement Get the link: http://www.leanblog.org/audio262

Back in 2013, I wrote a post that I published as part of the LinkedIn Influencer series: The Carrot and The Stick “On Steroids” Please check it out. I hope it makes you chuckle and think.

It's been a while since I've contributed something to the Lean Enterprise Institute's online publication, The Lean Post (see past articles). Today, they're allowing me to introduce some ideas from my book Measures of Success. Many "Lean thinkers" just haven't been exposed to these ideas. Many haven't read Deming or Wheeler... it's not their fault for not knowing of Process Behavior Charts and meth...

A retired labor leader from the automotive industry (who reads this blog) sent me a link to this article: #RedforMed: 1,800 Vermont Nurses Are On Strike Demanding Their Hospital Put Patients Over Profits The article isn't from a newspaper; it's from a site that provides "independent and incisive coverage of the labor movement and the struggles of workers to obtain safe, healthy and just workplaces...

http://leanblog.org/audio258 “ER wait times down, but only slightly” or ER wait times are virtually the same? This article was sent by a friend and blog reader from Winnipeg the other day: “ER wait times down, but only slightly” Oh good, the waiting times are down. But what does “only slightly” mean? Have ER wait times gone down in a meaningful way? Or are they just comparing two data points? Is t...

The Catch-22 of #Lean & Kaizen: You Get More ROI by NOT Focusing Only on High-ROI Projects http://www.leanblog.org/audio257

Leaders & Lean: We Need to Better Support Doctors and Other Providers When surgeons have no better options than complaining about process problems on LinkedIn, are their leaders and organizations really properly supporting them? In this post, we'll explore questions of blame, accountability, and engaging people in process improvement... being of better service to them.

My Talk in Vegas: Leadership Lessons from Statistics and Psychology Today, I’m giving a keynote talk at the Lean & Six Sigma World Conference being held in Las Vegas. I don’t normally attend or speak at “Lean Sigma” events, but I had an opportunity to give a new talk that touches on two of my favorite themes in recent years – the need to apply statistics and psychology to our “Lean Management” pra...

What's Going on at Tesla? Is @ElonMusk Following up on Employee Injuries? 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. I saw this article last year and never got around t...

The chain Whole Foods is reportedly having inventory shortages and morale problems. It sounds like a real mess, but thankfully nobody is calling it Lean. Their "Order to Shelf" system reminds me of "Pull to Order" work that I was involved in at Dell about 20 years ago...

Tour Preview: The Japanese Health Care System at a High Level As I prepare to go back to Japan, I'm sharing some insights about the Japanese health system from the excellent book "The Healing of America," by T.R. Reid.

The WSJ Overgeneralizes about The "Japanese Model," Not All Companies Are Toyota Not all Japanese companies are the same. "Lean isn't easy" if you're a Japanese company. Toyota has created something special, since "Toyota culture" is not exactly the same as "Japanese culture." The WSJ says the "model is cracking." Do scandals involving quality and ethical lapses involving companies including those...

#Lean Can Be Very Fragile, Especially With Executive Changes Lean can be very fragile. History shows that Lean can fall apart even in an organization that is years into a "Lean journey" with strong CEO involvement. How is this possible? If often happens when a new CEO is brought in from the outside. In the case of the manufacturing company, Wiremold, it happened when they were acquired by a French...

Employee Complaints About Lean in Healthcare, Even at Some of the Best Organizations Last week, I blogged about some employee complaints related to rotating day and night shifts at the Toyota San Antonio plant. In that post, I mentioned that employees who post on Glassdoor.com and other sites might not be a representative sample of the full employee population. With that in mind, what happens when...

Somebody *Did* Get Unjustly Fired in Hawaii, But System Problems Should be Blamed TL;DR Summary: "Employee 1" (the guy who pushed the "wrong" button) got fired. But the FCC report says: "The report finds that the false alert was not the result of a worker choosing the wrong alert by accident from a drop-down menu, but rather because the worker misunderstood a drill as a true emergency. The drill i...

I often get asked a question along the lines of "So, what exactly do you do?" Today, I give some updates about my various projects and partnerships, including continuing with KaiNexus (with a different title) and a new partnership with Value Capture.