Lean Blog Audio

http://leanblog.org/audio61 My wife and I were in Boston over the weekend, as it was her fifth reunion from her MIT master’s program. I’m also an alum, but was considered a “guest” since I graduated 16 years ago from my program and you don’t have to have an MIT degree to know 16 divided by 5 is not an integer. Being MIT, the reunion wasn’t just about parties (and it’s not a homecoming weekend with a football game, as my Northwestern 20th reunion will be this fall). The reunion was also full of lectures by alumni and notable faculty. I’ll be blogging soon about lectures by MIT Sloan professors Steve Spear (check out my podcasts with him) and Zeynep Ton (I’m reading her book The Good Jobs Strategy now and hope she’ll be a podcast guest too). A few things caught my eye on the Boston Herald and Boston Globe on Saturday.

At this year's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (see my summary here) Dr. John Toussaint talked about and introduced his newly released book Management on the Mend, a follow up to 2010's On the Mend. Summit attendees received a copy of the book, so they're the first to have a chance to read this important work.

In American healthcare, there's a growing gap between hospitals and clinics that are being innovative and those who are stuck in the "way it's always been done" mode. For example, innovative primary care clinics are using a combination of better processes and better technology to deliver a patient experience that I wish I could experience.

Jack Dorsey is well known among tech circles, as a co-founder of Twitter (he's @Jack) and, now, as the CEO of Square. I'm a frequent Twitter user (I'm @MarkGraban) and I also utilize the Square reader occasionally to sell a book to somebody. I appreciate being able to easily and inexpensively accept a credit card here and there.This interview on the public radio program Marketplace caught my eye (I mean, ear): Jack Dorsey: Twitter co-founder, Square CEO, punk

Don Davis, former CEO of Stanley Works, passed away in 2010 and left an unfinished book in progress. One of my friends (and former colleagues from Dell in the late '90s), Steve Cook and a number of other alumni completed the book, working with Don's daughter Ruthie Davis (of the eponymous shoe company).The book is Do the Right Thing: Real Life Stories of Leaders Facing Tough Choices. Do the Right Thing highlights Don's "leadership mantras" and real-life stories from alumni who leaned upon these mantras to make tough decisions in their careers.

It's not uncommon to hear statements thrown around about Lean that are more of a myth than anything resembling reality.I remember the time a professor told a group that if Toyota ran a health clinic, a buzzer would go off at the end of the planned appointment time and the patient would be kicked out of the room. That's ridiculous. That's a myth (and it's not one of the widely spoken myths). A Lean myth might be an example of L.A.M.E. or "Lean As Mistakenly Explained." This post addresses other myths, including the idea that "Lean is not patient centered."

I love to cook and I"m the primary chef in my home. I often get asked a question - sometimes it’s serious and sometimes it’s smart-alecky - “Do you 5S your kitchen?” If by that, they mean, “Do you label the outside of your cabinets and put tape outlines around everything?” then the answer is no. And I’m not sure why anybody would want to… but if doing so makes your life easier, then great - that’s what Lean is all about, solving problems and being more effective. I do, however, try to apply Lean principles in our kitchen. I can’t help it....

Here's my latest post for LinkedIn through their "Influencers" series. It might be old hat to readers of this blog, but I hope what I shared is useful for a wider audience that I have there.10 Key Lean Mindsets for Factories, Hospitals, Startups, and More http://leanblog.org/audio54

http://leanblog.org/audio53 In my first post about the on-site Kaizen learning experience at Franciscan St. Francis Health, an event I came to call "Kaizen Live," I wrote about some of the initial presentations and discussions from Franciscan leaders. You can also see my tweets from the days.A big part of the 1.5-day event was the three "gemba visits" that took place. Each attendee had the chance to visit pharmacy, endoscopy, and the NICU. I had visited all three departments before (when we shot this series of videos last October) and I focused this time on the NICU, going there all three times. Why did I go three times? Some of it was logistics, as I was the person responsible for getting each group there and I don't know my way around the hospital that well. It was easier to learn one path - how to get to the NICU and back. Since my last visit in October 2014, the NICU movedinto a new physical space (in November). The old unit was the traditional NICU of days past - a big open room with curtains that divided the space for each infant incubator, but didn't provide too much privacy. The new, modern NICU was built with private rooms with sliding glass doors - providing more quiet and privacy than before. While the NICU team had implemented hundreds of Kaizens in previous years, the chance to design a brand new space was a rare opportunity for radical Kaizen, or what might be called "Kaikaku." Since it's difficult to continuously improve many elements of a physicallayout (such as the location of walls), the team experimented with full-size Styrofoam mockups of the space. Staff and parents were able to give input at a stage when you could still Adjust easily in the PDSA model of Plan, Do, Study, Adjust.

http://leanblog.org/audio52 There's been a back and forth of views about the state of pediatric emergency medicine recently in the Wall St Journal.Let me start first, actually, with the more recent statement, a rebuttal from Michael Gerardi M.D., FACEP, President of the American College of Emergency Physicians, in the form of a letter to the editor. He wrote: "Emergency care of children in the U.S. is the best in the world. Emergency physicians treat more than 22 million sick and injured children under age 15 each year, and the vast majority of them have good outcomes. If a child has a medical emergency, parents should get that child to the nearest emergency room and have confidence that they are receiving top-quality care in the right place from the right physicians." It's "the best in the world." Is that an opinion? Where is the data to back that up?