This article posted anonymously on AllNurses.com has over one million views in the month since it first appeared:"Hospitals Firing Seasoned Nurses: Nurses FIGHT Back!"

It's an "Open Letter to Hospital Administrators."

Engaging Staff in Improvement is Actually the Toyota Way, TooHere, I blogged about an article I read in Modern Healthcare that said, basically, Toyota isn't innovative and maybe therefore healthcare should look to Google as a management system and model of staff engagement and continuous improvement.

WHAT? Toyota doesn't engage staff in continuous improvement? That's, frankly, ignorant and it's a great example of L.A.M.E. -- Lean As Misguidedly Explained.

I wrote a new piece for LinkedIn that I hope would be of interest to you even if you’re in healthcare. Why? It’s a story about what an organization does when you don’t have enough (or any) direct work for your front-line staff to do. Toyota would continue paying employees and would put them to...

I get asked a lot, "How do you know if a hospital is truly 'Lean?'"Nobody is ever perfect or "fully Lean," but you could ask, "How do you know if somebody is on a legitimate Lean transformation journey?"

http://leanblog.org/audio120

Last year, Joe Swartz and I hosted a workshop at his organization, Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. We called it“Kaizen Live!” and it was designed as an opportunity to see a culture of continuous improvement – what does it look like? What do people say?We lay this out in our Healthcare Kaizen books...

http://leanblog.org/audio119

Alternate title:“Lean is an Integrated System. Of Course Just Implementing Pieces Leads to Failure.” Throughout the 10 years that I’ve been involved with Lean healthcare efforts, I’ve heard multiple stories of organizations that ended their formal Lean initiatives. They do so, as I’ve been told, because they need to cut costs...

http://leanblog.org/audio118

At KaiNexus, we've been fortunate to have a good relationship with Professor Ethan Burris, from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business. He has done a lot of research and publishing around employee engagement and idea systems, as I've mentioned here on the blog before: "Is Fear the Only Reason Employees Don't Speak Up?"Burris has a new article on the Harvard Business Review website:

"Employee Suggestion Schemes Don't Have to Be Exercises in Futility"

In the article posted today, Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. (the later the author of the popular book How Doctors Think), rant about all sorts of things… some of which have nothing to do with Lean...

http://leanblog.org/audio116

http://leanblog.org/audio115

A hat tip goes to Brian Buck for sharing this quote via email recently. Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was a pithy and wise man.

I didn't remember this quote, but it is attributed to him. It's very appropriate for the type of work we do.

I shared it last Saturday in my "Key Tweets" post, but it's worth discussing here in a separate post, I think.

I had a bit of a new year's resolution about being positive and not fretting about organizations that don't "get it" when it comes to Lean. But, resolutions are meant to be broken, I guess.It's very frustrating when I hear people in healthcare complain that their hospital or health system has equated Lean with cost savings -- only focusing on cost reduction or primarily focusing on it. Hospitals that say to their staff that Lean is just about cutting costs (or demonstrate that) willfail to engage their most important asset -- their employees.

http://leanblog.org/audio114