Lean Blog Audio

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

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."

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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?