Lean Blog Audio

http://leanblog.org/audio41' I hope you might have access to this interesting article from the Wall St. Journal: "Toyota Veteran Rises to Corporate Office From Factory Floor." I was able to access it while logged out from my WSJ account.Mitsuru Kawai, pictured, started working at Toyota in 1963, at age 15. After 52 years of employment, Kawai is going to be in the position of senior managing officer, "the highest position ever held by a blue-collar worker in Toyota's eight decades," per the WSJ.

http://leanblog.org/audio40 Every time I am in a hospital or clinic setting, one of the first things I do is get a pump or squirt of gel or foam from a wall-mounted dispenser to clean my hands.Or, I should say *try* to get hand sanitizer. For one, it's important to practice proper hand hygiene when entering or leaving a unit, for my sake and the patients (and to practice what I preach, a secondary concern). Secondly, I'm testing to see if the hospital's support processes work well - isthe dispenser actually not empty? It's usually not difficult at all to find an empty gel or foam dispenser on the wall. Sometimes, the first one I try is empty (as are others). Sometimes, I have to try a few... but there's almost always an empty one.

http://leanblog.org/audio39 Joe Swartz and I have been planning the first-ever workshop (a conference of sorts) where people can come see what a Kaizen culture, or a culture of continuous improvement, looks like at his health system, Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis.It's designed to be a small event. We have ten people registered right now, with a few more committed, and we have space for up to 25 people total. You can still sign up and attend on April 22 (full day) and April 23 (half day). Learn more at http://leanblog.org/audio39.

http://leanblog.org/audio38 When people ask me why I do what I do, my first answers are:improving patient safetycreating better workplaces for people It's as simple as that. Those are the important problems that I'm passionate about (and have been able to help fix, at least in some local situations). At a more global scale, too many patients are hurt or killed by preventable medicalerrors. Too many people end up hating their jobs or going home crying or exhausted at the end of the day. That needs to change. In my 20-year career, in manufacturing and in healthcare, Lean has been a powerful and effective methodology for meeting those goals, along with improving quality, reducing waiting times (for products or for care), and reducing cost. But, not always.

Last Monday, I had the chance to attend a Lean Startup event in Austin where Eric Ries announced the launch of a Kickstarter project for a new book. 10 days ago isn't much of a "throwback," but bear with me.He was asked a question from the audience: "Do you wish you had used a different name than Lean Startup to resonate more broadly?" Before we get to Eric's answer, I thought back to me asking Jim Womack that same question about the term "Lean." When I worked for LEI back in 2009, I asked Jim casually and he said basically, "It's just a word" or something like that. But, I got a longer response to this question from Jim back in Podcast #118, in 2011 (which makes it more of a real throwback now).

http://leanblog.org/audio36 When we introduce the idea of Lean to healthcare organizations, it's very common for somebody (often a senior physician) to say something like,"But we don't want assembly line medicine." The implication is that assembly lines and factories are cold, rigid, uncaring places that focus on ruthless efficiency and making the numbers at the expense of safety and quality. Do a Google search for the term and the implications of "assembly line medicine" are very negative. It's also a bit of a "red herring" (or is it a "straw man") for them to bring up assembly lines when we're in agreement (I hope) that our goals are to improve safety, quality, waiting times, cost, and staff morale.

Today's Throwback Thursday is a look back at a 1993 book that I purchased in 2011 on somebody's recommendation. It was probably one of those used books you can buy for a penny on Amazon... Creating the New American Hospital: A Time for Greatness. It's indeed available for a penny today.I had flipped through the book at the time as it was interesting to me to get more context on how hospitals are not just suddenly in crisis (financial or otherwise) in recent years. Book-NAHChapter 1 of the book is titled "Why Hospitals Fail." The author says, "Clearly, something isn't working."

http://leanblog.org/audio34 OK, so it’s not the kind of scientific research that involves lab coats and microscopes, but I’m doing some research that I’d like your help with. I’m looking to do some research and some interviews for writing projects related to two different topics: Understanding Variation and Reducing Blame.

Back in 2002, when I worked for a software startup called Factory Logic, I was able to sit in on some Lean training that was created and presented by a large electronics manufacturer that will remain unnamed (and it wasn't Dell). The class was for that company's suppliers, primarily...

http://leanblog.org/audio32 This week is the annual Patient Safety Awareness Week, presented by the National Patient Safety Foundation, a non-profit that I like and support. As Lean thinkers, I hope we'd recognize that the amount of patient harm and death that's caused by preventable medical errors is a huge problem around the world.When we ask "why is there so much harm?" there are many answers - causes and root causes. There's no simple answer to the question of why so much harm occurs and why, sometimes, it seems like not enough progress is being made. One contributing factor, I think, is the lack of public awareness aboutthis problem and the scale of it...