Lean Blog Audio

Highlights of "Boss Level Podcast" - Gen. Stan McChrystal and the Book "Team of Teams" I've read most of retired General Stanley McChrystal's excellent book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (I start a lot of books and finish a few). Amazon reminds me that I bought the book just over two years ago. I meant to blog about it and never got around to it (I have a lot of ideas about posts and write a few). McChrystal, in connecting his lessons learned from helping reshape the military and, in particular, the special forces, to the business world ends up talking a lot about issues and history near and dear to those of us working with Lean as a methodology. I'll come back to my thoughts on the book later, but I was thrilled to stumble across a podcast called "Boss Level Podcast," which is hosted by Sami Honkonen from Finland.

Today at 3 PM, I'm doing a webinar at the invitation of the BC Patient Safety & Quality Council, as part of their "Quality Café" series. Thanks for the invitation! It's open to the public and it's titled: "Standardize What Makes Sense... Then Engage Everybody in Improving What You Standardized" I hope you can join us...

I enjoy "gemba visits" (of sorts) to wineries and vacations often focus on this walking, tasting, and learning. I usually read the wine column that's in the Wall St. Journal each Saturday, and this one stood out to me: "Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Sommelier?"

Back in 2012, I blogged twice about aspects of Dr. Donald M. Berwick's 1989 article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Continuous Improvement as an Ideal in Health Care.” The full text is only available to subscribers. As I posted on LinkedIn, another aspect of this article caught my eye when I was reviewing it the other day in advance of my talk at the Studer Group "What's Right in Healthcare" conference next week.

I'm excited to be attending the annual Lean Coaching Summit today through Thursday in Austin. If you're there, please say hi! Today, I've registered to take a class on a topic that I've taken an interest in over the past few years: "Motivational Interviewing," or MI for short. I'm hoping to learn more about coaching people through their stages of "change talk," as related to Lean and organizational change... and that's what today's post is about.

There are Dr. W. Edwards Deming quotes that get thrown around... one that sounds incredibly "pro-data" and others that say data and measures are not the only thing... which is it? How do you reconcile that?

An article from this week in 2010... Today's New York Times has an outstanding article about Lean Healthcare and what Seattle Children's Hospital calls C.P.I. or Continuous Performance Improvement. The article: "Factory Efficiency Comes to the Hospital" I wish the headline had also addressed quality, waiting time, and staff engagement, but the article body does, at least. The article highlights Seattle Children's Hospital, as well as others, including members of the Healthcare Value Network (Park Nicollet, Akron Children's, and Paul Levy's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center), and Virginia Mason Medical Center. Yours truly is quoted in the article, as well.

A few of you sent me this sad article from the Wall St. Journal:  "'People Are Dying Here': Federal Hospitals Fail Tribes."  I feel like I've some variation of this article and exposé many times over. Sometimes, it's some form of government medicine (active duty military medicine, the VA, or another country) or it's a similar sad story from the private healthcare sector (be it non-profit or for-profit).

In this post, I write about a phrase that I heard many times when visiting Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. How can this phrase help us challenge ourselves and to find positive solutions instead of barriers and obstacles?

Does the Phrase "Lean Transformation" Jump to a Solution? Another in the series of "do words matter?" posts... do phrases like "Lean Transformation" resonate as much as "Business Transformation?"