Lean Blog Audio

Today, I discuss two articles: The first article is: "The NFL's Best Practice: No Wasted Time." "If You Can't Hire Urban Meyer, Can You Clone Him?" http://leanblog.org/audio91

http://leanblog.org/audio90 It's far too common to see somebody with just a little bit of understanding about Lean do things that really shouldn't be described as Lean at all... in terms of the decisions they are making or the approaches they are taking.I saw an article about Lean in physician practices: "Lean Practice Management for Physicians." I cringed a bit when the author said: "In lean management programs, there are levels of belts based upon the colors found in karate: white, yellow, green, black, and levels of black." No. That's an example of "Lean As Mistakenly Explained."

I stumbled across an article from the Inc. magazine archives from 1987, so it's today's "Throwback Thursday."In 1987, I was starting high school and that was probably right about the time when my dad, an engineer for General Motors, was able to attend one of Deming's famed four-day seminars. Hearing about that was my first exposure to Deming or anything vaguely related to Lean thinking.

Mark Graban talks about the revised 3rd edition of "Lean Hospitals" and a new eBook project called "Practicing Lean."

Stories like this have been in the news before, but this was circulating the past few days: "Why erratic schedules are one of the worst parts of low-wage work."The story refers to so-called "just-in-time" scheduling techniques that jerk employees around and disrupt lives. It happens to share a term, "JIT" with "Lean manufacturing" or just "Lean," but it's either a coincidence or it's a bastardization of what Lean is really about. And I can prove it quite easily.

http://leanblog.org/audio86 I saw this story when it originally appeared online as part of a local public radio station in California. It was now picked up nationally by NPR and a number of you emailed me about this Lean healthcare piece about UCLA Medical Center:Hospitals Turn To Toyota To Make Care Safer And Swifter It's a generally positive story about a large hospital system working to improve... and turning to Toyota (directly to Toyota) for help. To be fair, they did far more than organize closets... but that was the main photo and lead story that started the piece.

How do you MAKE time for continuous improvement?It's been a little while, but here's a new video about Kaizen and continuous improvement from our friends at Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. In this video, Hollynn Lobsiger, the manager of the endoscopy unit, talks about what Kaizen means to her and her team and she also shares some thoughts about how to make time for Kaizen. Everybody (or nearly everybody) complains about not having enough time for improvement - that includes time for staff and time for managers. The challenge is how to go from "lack of time" being an excuse to being a problem that you solve (see my video about this). Hollynn and her team are a great example of being proactive to make time for improvement (as you can see in this video with staff describing an improvement). See how Hollynn sets a tone for them and expects input from everybody? They're "Kaizen Crazy!" :-)

The Problem With Underreporting Problems, When Warnings Aren’t Heeded in Aerospace, When Warnings Aren’t Heeded in Aerospace, When Warnings or Concerns Aren’t Shared in Healthcare http://leanblog.org/audio84

Allen Iverson was a legendary NBA point guard and scorer who played from 1996 to 2011.In a 2002 news conference that still appears regularly on ESPN, Iverson responded to criticism that he missed practice (due to injury) and he somewhat indignantly asked (over and over) some variation of: "We're talking about practice?" Iverson wasn't complaining about having to practice, but more about the media's insistence on asking questions about practice, which is a topic he apparently didn't think was too interesting to talk about. Practice is certainly important. Maybe not when you're already as good as Iverson was.

I guess this counts as a "Flashback Friday," as I was reminded of an old game show that I loved as a kid: Match Game. I was too young to fully appreciate the show, I guess, but I remember it fondly and love watching old reruns (you can find episodes on YouTube).Last week, I read this article: "A happy workforce is a productive one." You'll certainly get no argument from me on that! Well, I think "engagement" is more important than happiness, as happiness might possibly be superficial. But I've long said that an engaged workforce is the key to success in an organization. I thought the article got off track when the author brought up suggestion boxes. Oh no. Suggestion boxes never work. So I took a line from the article and posed it as a Match Game type question on Twitter: