Lean Blog Audio, with Mark Graban

It’s time for another new, revised edition of my book! It was originally published in 2008 as Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction.

This article in The Wall Street Journal caught my eye the other day: "Can Tech Speed Up Emergency Room Care?" But, it seems like the real story is process redesign, which is barely mentioned in the story...

A few of you sent me this article... and you were correct to think I would be interested: "Inside Alabama's Auto Jobs Boom: Cheap Wages, Little Training, Crushed Limbs The South's manufacturing renaissance comes with a heavy price."

It's been 10 years since I first wrote about my awkward acronym L.A.M.E. Is it helpful to distinguish between true Lean principles and "Lean As Misguidedly Explained?" Will we see more L.A.M.E. talk and behaviors in the future?

Today, I'm happy to share a link to a white paper that I co-authored for Catalysis (formerly the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value). The paper is titled: "Lean for Doctors." Appropriately, the co-authors are two physician leaders you might very well know: Dr. John Toussaint (founder of Catalysis) and Dr. Jack Billi (from the University of Michigan).

Today's Post in

In today's post, I write about how Kaizen starts with you. I share some examples of "personal Kaizen," including the way I've streamlined my call scheduling process, for my benefit and for others.

While I'm writing here about Northwestern men's basketball learning from Duke (without copying everything), the same ideas apply if you're Ford learning from Toyota or a hospital learning from ThedaCare.

Thanks to GoLeanSixSigma.com for asking me some questions for a discussion that they've posted on their website.

Today's Post in

Art Byrne's latest book, The Lean Turnaround Action Guide, has a lot of great tips that he's trying to share, CEO to CEO. How many CEOs are reading this book and heeding his advice, in manufacturing or in healthcare?

Registration is now open for our "Kaizen Live!" event, where you can visit Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis to see what a "culture of continuous improvement" is like in a way that will help you in creating the same for your organization.

Today's Post in

Today's post points to my guest blog post for the W. Edwards Deming Institute: Reflections on Dr. Deming's Hospital Notes - What Has Changed Since 1990? Why do the same problems that Dr. Deming experienced as a patient 30 years ago still happen so often today?

This post in

Lean sometimes gets, I think, an unfair rap that it's only a method for incremental improvement. See this article, from the NEJM website, for example: "Limits of Lean -- Transformative Care Redesign Must Go Beyond Typical Lean-Based Improvements."

I saw this article a few days ago in one of the larger healthcare industry trade publications: How One Woman Saved IU Health $54 Million The headline is misleading, as addressed in the opening sentence / sub-headline of the story (via HealthLeaders): "With a little help from about 10,000 of her friends and colleagues, the head of Indiana University Health's office of transformation leaned in to cut waste and encourage value, one project at a time." That's more like it and more likely... Lean is a team effort that, ideally, engages everybody... so it's not surprising to hear about 10,000 participants and the need to share that credit. Like almost every health system, IU Health faced financial pressures. I'll give their board credit for pushing for a method other than traditional layoff-based "cost cutting." "IU Health had already tried some performance improvement projects, but they were scattershot and not based on a unified philosophy. In order to improve results and scale the improvement process, the board challenged then-CEO Dan Evans to deploy a system-wide value-improvement tool that could enlist all employees."

When I talk to organizations about Kaizen, or continuous improvement, there's far too much self-defeating talk, where people say things like: "We're not going to try this Kaizen process because our culture isn't ready yet." That's not only self-defeating, it's self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't work on continuous improvement, you'll never have a culture of continuous improvement.

Yesterday, the W. Edwards Deming Institute published the second in my series of three posts for them: "The Failure of "The Livonia Philosophy" at my GM Plant." Read more...

In my travels, I often meet people or visit organizations that say something like: "We're doing Lean... we just call it Process Improvement." They have a "Process Improvement" (PI) department, or they call it "Continuous Process Improvement" (CPI). They have people in roles like "Process Improvement Facilitators." While process improvement is great, in using a term like that, there's perhaps a risk that they miss the full and complete essence of Lean and, therefore, don't get the results that they might hope for.