Here's an interesting column from Becker's Hospital Review, written by Michael Dowling, President and CEO, Northwell Health. I'm guessing he created the headline, since the phrase “give a damn” doesn't appear in the article: " Michael Dowling: CEOs — Give a damn about your people " Who are the CEOs he is speaking to who do NOT give a damn? What inspired him to write this?...
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 low. They were who they were and my new plant manager in 1996 started to change things. Boeing is a...
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, since Hipcast has been having a lot of technical issues going back to last Tuesday or so. Their websi...
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 responsibility… This year, Servais chose a Japanese word: Kaizen. An avid reader, Servais got it from a book by M...
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 seen it in healthcare.
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 organizations are looking in the mirror to see what they can do to improve the work environment. That's al...
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 transformational leaders seem to be few and far between. How many organizations have “bureaucrats” at the h...
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 methods like this. But, I hope this post helps people see that "bowling charts" and "red/green" analysis...
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." Again, for the record, I'm all in favor of "safety, healthy, and just workplaces." That's what Le...
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 this “down” a signal or is it just noise in the system? These are the types of questions that can be ...
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” practices or Six Sigma or whatever. I also bury the lede and talk about the soft launch of my book ...
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 to blogging about it: "This Email From Elon Musk to Tesla Employees Is a Master Class in Emotional In...
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 and Nissan tarnish Lean and the Toyota Production System? No. That's as silly as thinking the Wells...
#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 company, Legrand. As an aside, the team that coined the term "Lean" almost used the term "fragile,"...
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 we search the Glassdoor surveys of some well-known "Lean hospitals?" I posted a few of these employ...
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 incorrectly included the language "This is not a drill." So, the language from the drill didn't meet ...
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.
I've written about many of these ideas and themes before in various blog posts, but I wanted to consolidate my thoughts on the Lean concept of "standardized work" in a single place. This is partly for my own personal reference (and future linking), but also can prompt some discussion amongst my friends, the Lean Blog readers.
What We're Looking Forward to Learning at the Toyota Plant Tour Tomorrow, with the entire KaiNexus team, I'm going to visit the Toyota truck plant in San Antonio, the plant referred TMMTX. The 15 of us will be there in closed toed shoes and all other required clothing to learn about the Toyota Production System, Kaizen (continuous improvement), and Lean. I've blogged about it on the KaiNexus blog. I asked the KaiNexus team to say a little bit about what they hope to learn in the visit and you ca...
What the Book "Lean Thinking" Said About Healthcare in 1996 http://www.leanblog.org/audio244 When the book Lean Thinking (by Jim Womack and Dan Jones) was originally published in 1996, it seems likely that hardly anyone was applying Lean principles in healthcare. Sure, you had organizations applying TQM or CQI principles (or even some of the lessons of Dr. W. Edwards Deming). Joan Wellman did some of her first Lean healthcare experiments in 1995, but there weren't any "Lean healthcare" case stud...
The Response to the Hawaii False Alarm Can't End With Firing Someone -- This and other nuclear threats due to bad systems http://www.leanblog.org/audio243 Saturday, you might have seen the news about a "false alarm" push alert that was sent to many iPhones and other smart phones in Hawaii. An alert was also sent out over many TV channels through the Emergency Response System. Is the response one that focuses on blame and punishment? Or is it focused on understanding how systems fail and how to i...
