Lean Blog Audio with Mark Graban

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 my main focus these days, finishing that up. Amazon has sold over 5,000 copies to date (a total of both formats). A relatively small number of books have been sold through other channels, including direct sales through me. One advantage of being the publisher is that I can see real-time data from Amazon and IngramSpark. For previous books, I have to ask my former editor to run a report.

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....

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).

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.

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 postIn this episode, Mark Graban breaks down a rare moment in mainstream business journalism: a Wall Street Journal article that actually does a respectable job explaining Lean. Using GE and CEO Larry Culp as a case study, Mark explores why the story stands out—and what it reveals about leadership, culture, and the real work of continuous improvement.Mark walks through examples highlighted in the article, from simple but powerful flow redesign at a GE factory to Culp’s hands-on participation in kaizen events. He reflects on the WSJ’s surprising accuracy in describing Lean as a culture—not just inventory reduction—and discusses why focusing only on “just-in-time” often distorts Toyota’s system.You’ll hear commentary on:Why “rewiring” GE mattered more than the later corporate breakupHow tracing a steel blade’s 3-mile journey exposed deep operational wasteWhy Lean is as much about psychology and management as tools and layoutsThe importance of CEOs modeling improvement—not just sponsoring itHow standard work, kaizen, and even DEI efforts connect through the same principlesThis episode is for anyone interested in understanding Lean beyond the clichés—and seeing what happens when journalism, leadership, and operational excellence (for once) all line up.If you’ve ever wished major business media would reflect how Lean actually works, this conversation might feel refreshingly close.See some of that poor WSJ track record, including recent pandemic supply chain articles.You're normally better off reading about Lean from the source.

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