Lean Blog Audio

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 company that has been pointed at as a great example of Lean Manufacturing, so it's troubling to read reports that suggest otherwise. From the New York Times: Claims of Shoddy Production Draw Scrutiny to a Second Boeing Jet Workers at a 787 Dreamliner plant in South Carolina have complained of defective manufacturing, debris left on planes and pressure to not report violations.

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 website has been down, the podcast feeds (RSS feeds) have been broken. People haven't been able to listen to my podcasts unless they had already downloaded the episodes through their app.

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 Masaaki Imai called Kaizen: The key to Japan's competitive success.”

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 always been one of my primary motivations for Lean in any workplace — providing a better, more fulfilling work setting.

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 helm?

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.