Lean Blog Audio

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 test my hypothesis about people being willing to buy the book. Once I saw eBook sales start coming in (and getting positive feedback), I made the investment in getting the paperback book created (a professional page design and layout process). By the way, the phrase “self-publishing” is a misnomer. My company is the publisher, but I didn't do it myself! For my next book, The Mistakes That Make Us, my company will be the publisher again, but the plan is to launch Kindle and paperback versions together at the same time. Probably this summer. But I need to finish the manuscript first! I'm almost there. That's m

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. Intentional harm could be called sabotage or assault.... --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lean-blog-audio/support

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). --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lean-blog-audio/support

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 thoughts. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lean-blog-audio/support

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 this new article by HBS professor Willy Shih in HBR: What Really Makes Toyota's Production System Resilient Did TPS hurt Toyota during the pandemic? NO --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Blog post - https://leanblog.org/audio321 Elon Musk tweeted this yesterday: "Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn't." --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Blog post: http://www.leanblog.org/audio320 Contact me to talk about psychological safety - measure, learn, improve “Simply put, we cannot get to zero harm without psychological safety.” I wrote that as part of this page on the Value Capture website: Psychological Safety and its Essential Link to Continuous Improvement I've come to understand that psychological safety is a precondition for “implementing #Lean” or however you might say. Toyota seems to strive for (if not have) a relatively high level of psychological safety. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Episode #319 -- read the blog post that contains video of the webinar A contractor unplugged my WiFi router. Or was there more to it than that? Instead of blaming somebody else, what mistakes did I make that led to the Q&A section of my webinar being knocked offline? --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Blog post: https://www.leanblog.org/audio318 The Wall Street Journal has an epic track record when it comes to always getting it wrong when they write about Lean or the Toyota Production System. They always focus on just the “just in time” pillar, ignoring “jidoka” (built in quality) as the other pillar (per Toyota). They ignore many other aspects of TPS, like the culture and the management style. See some of that track record, including recent pandemic supply chain articles. You're normally better off reading about Lean from the source. But, they did better in this recent article about General Electric and CEO Larry Culp (who knows Lean very well from his time as CEO of Danaher): Larry Culp Rewired GE. Then He Unwound It. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Blog post: https://www.leanblog.org/audio317 Oh, how I enjoyed this article a month ago when it was sent to me. It's from 2003, but it was new to me: Why dolphins are deep thinkers --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Blog post: https://www.leanblog.org/audio316 I received a question from a healthcare leader who had read about the “idea card” format and method that Joe Swartz and I shared in our Healthcare Kaizen books. I read your post about the Idea Card. Amazing! Have a follow up question. What does Kaizen suggest about how to incentivize people to submit ideas? She's asking about the “Kaizen” style and approach to continuous improvement. I'll share some of my reply along with some relevant excerpts from the book. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Blog post: https://www.leanblog.org/audio315 I'm really excited to be hosting and moderating this webinar next week, the second in our new Value Capture Webinar series. The title is "Applications of Lean Leadership Methods in Home-Based Care." --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

Blog post: https://www.leanblog.org/audio314 In this era of Covid--19 vaccination, I'm still pretty much sidelined and not on site with any clients, although I did get to visit two mass vaccination sites (in addition to the one that vaccinated me). I have tried really hard to be a cheerleader for continuous improvement and, in particular, for sharing continuous improvement ideas through the free VacciNexus platform and through other channels. I believe, of course, in the power of many, many small improvements being driven by front line staff and their managers. That's the focus of my Healthcare Kaizen books. I also realize there's a time and a place for process re-design and for being innovative (thinking of it as step-change improvement. In this post, I share and discuss improvements large and small. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

https://www.leanblog.org/audio313 tl;dr summary: Lean isn't just efficiency... it's safety, quality, delivery, cost, and morale. People often misunderstand that -- they don't know or they were taught the wrong things I often have the opportunity to teach a group of experienced healthcare professionals, from a wide range of disciplines, about Lean. My session is part of a longer professional development program that's framed as "clinical outcomes and patient safety." Lean has a lot to contribute to those outcomes, and you can see a collection of results here or here. Since my last session had to be virtual, due to the pandemic, I took advantage of the opportunity to use some interactive tools from Mentimeter.com. This is something I'll continue doing even when I have the chance to teach in person, as people can vote or give input from their phones, anonymously, while sitting in class. One question I asked the group was: What does "Lean" mean to you in terms of improvement? --- Support this podcast: https://

https://www.leanblog.org/audio312 In this post, I'm going to share some reflections from one of my workplaces, some things that occurred last week. I'm going to be vague, so forgive me for that. It feels right to be less specific in this case, or at least that's the cautious (and maybe respectful) thing to do. When wearing one of my different "hats" with one of the organizations I work with, something went wrong. It wasn't something I did (or I would own up to that in specific ways). But the mistake affected me and the work I was doing. When a preventable process problem occurs, the engineer in me finds it relatively easy to be logical and think through "what happened?" instead of "who messed up?" A few deep calming breaths help, as well. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://www.leanblog.org/audio311 I'm not a Buffalo Bills fan (a.k.a. "The Bills Mafia"), but I did attend one game at what was then called Rich Stadium in 1998 when I was a grad school intern at Kodak. Even without being a fan, I wish I could have written a headline for this post that said "Buffalo Bills Kaizen Their Way to a Super Bowl." Readers of this blog, of course, know that "Kaizen" is a Japanese word meaning "good change" and it's framed as an approach to engaging everybody in small improvements to the way they do their work. So what does this have to do with football? Football is a workplace, even if it's college. I blogged about my alma mater, Northwestern University, using the word "Kaizen" (and the mindset) within their football program. This article about the Bills isn't new, but I recently discovered it on Twitter: Sean McDermott, Bills use 'Kaizen' strategy to stress constant improvement From the article... --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

https://www.leanblog.org/audio310 During this "let's try to get people vaccinated" phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, almost every article that I've seen about the vaccine and its distribution mentions the need to not waste precious doses. There are many opportunities for error with the different vaccines. If some of them aren't stored properly at the correct temperature, the vaccine degrades and gets wasted (or worse, gets injected and gives a false promise of effectiveness). Good process design (lessons I learned as an engineer) means being proactive and thinking about what could go wrong -- and then designing the process in a way that prevents errors or mistakes. The ideal would be "error proofing" that makes it impossible to make a mistake. Or, we could make it more apparent that a mistake has been made (for example, a temperature-sensitive label on a vaccine bottle that would let you know if it's been out of the correct storage temperature too long). A countermeasure like this might prevent the mistake of u

https://www.leanblog.org/audio309  Subscribe now to "My Favorite Mistake" --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://www.leanblog.org/audio308 You might have heard of a "social media takeover" where a brand with a large following gives control of their social media feed to somebody who is promoting a cause or a social message. One person I've followed on LinkedIn is Deondra Wardelle. She is a Lean practitioner (like me) and she's a Black woman (unlike me). So, thinking back to the idea of a "social media takeover." I was inspired by Deondra, so I asked her to accept a "blog handover" as I'm calling it. My initial thought was to give a platform for her to write and talk about anything she wanted, to give more exposure to her voice. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support

http://www.leanblog.org/audio307 Today, I wanted to share an excellent article written by Dr. John Toussaint (of Catalysis) and Ken Segel (of Value Capture)... --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lean-blog-audio/support