Mark's Note: I asked my firiend Sam Selay to write a blog post on this topic after some private discussions that we had. He agreed and shared this post. I've talked to many others who have run into similar roadblocks and frustrations when trying, with the best of intentions, to bring their Lean skills and experience into healthcare.

Sam was one of the contributing authors to the anthology "Practicing Lean," which is now available through Apple iBooks, in addition to Amazon (Kindle and paperback), and Leanpub (eBook and audiobook). Here is his post:

In June, I was informed by my employer that the company had decided to go in a new direction. They said they would now build lean into their processes and enable process owners to be responsible for all continuous improvement functions. To date, I don’t know many organizations that have been able to successfully embed lean into everyone’s work and sustain it.

The post A Lean Healthcare Job Interview Process: Thoughts and Reflections appeared first on Lean Blog.

Here's the latest installment of "Key Tweets," a (usually) weekly post that presents some of my tweets (or retweets) from the week, including pictures and other interesting stuff. I sometimes also re-share items that I've posted on LinkedIn.

The post Key #Lean Tweets (and LinkedIn Posts) from @MarkGraban — Early July 2018 appeared first on Lean Blog.

Today is one of those days where I think, "Forget what I have to say, read this...."

This being a LinkedIn post written by James Hereford, the CEO of Fairview Health Services in Minnesota.

"How huddles help us lead"

I think the "us" says a lot, instead of a headline about "How huddles help ME lead."

The post A Health System CEO Leads by Example on #Lean & Huddles appeared first on Lean Blog.

Mark's Note: Today's post is the first guest post by Jess Orr, who you might remember from the webinars that she did for KaiNexus. I hope you enjoy the post...

As a continuous improvement practitioner, I recently faced a challenge that seemed nearly insurmountable.

The post How 200 Jobs Were Saved by Engaging Employees in Continuous Improvement appeared first on Lean Blog.

Last week, I wrote Part 1 of this piece about TQM and "Small Kaizen" at a Japanese Hospital pharmacy.

The hospital was happy that employees were participating in their "Small Kaizen" process, but there was a month in which they saw the number of submitted Kaizens drop, from about 138 to 58 or so.

As I write about in Measures of Success, two data points usually don't make a trend.

The post Should This Japanese Hospital React to a Dip in Kaizen Submissions? appeared first on Lean Blog.

The first thing that prompted me to write this post is an interesting article about Toyota and their Georgetown, Kentucky plant that's known as TMMK (via Ward's Auto):

"New Lexus Big Test for Toyota’s Georgetown Plant and Its New Manager"

How does their approach and mindset seem to differ from Tesla?

The post Comparing Toyota’s Latest Ramp Up to Tesla’s appeared first on Lean Blog.

Are minor league games taking longer? Well, yes and no, depending on the league.

My next book, Measures of Success, is about the use of this Process Behavior Chart methodology in the workplace, as applied to our performance measures. 

This post explores some data, how asking for more data can be more helpful, and how to use charts to evaluate a metric over time.

The post Are Minor League Baseball Games Getting Slower or Faster? appeared first on Lean Blog.

Last week, I saw a headline about a drop in NCAA college football attendance.

I wasn't satisfied with the two data point comparisons or other written descriptions of the metrics. I wanted to see data. SHOW ME THE DATA, JERRY! (with apologies to "Jerry Maguire"). I wanted to see a chart. So, I found the data on to NCAA website and created "process behavior charts" that tell you much more about the data than text numbers ever could.

The post Every Metric Has Variation – What Can We Learn from NCAA Football Attendance? appeared first on Lean Blog.

Today's post is written by Steve Hoeft, the SVP, Chief of Operations Excellence at Baylor Scott & White Health (BSWH) here in Texas. This is his first written contribution to Lean Blog, but you might remember him as a guest in episode #226 of my podcast, where he and co-author Dr. Bob Pryor talked about their book The Power of Ideas to Transform Healthcare: Engaging Staff by Building Daily Lean Management Systems.

His article begins: "In my years serving as continuous improvement leader and consultant for some great organizations, I've discovered something consistent: Improvement will not happen on its own."

The post All Organizations Need a “Make Me” appeared first on Lean Blog.

When looking at data, whether it's the number of homicides in San Antonio or some of our workplace metrics, it's tempting to overreact to a "headline" that says a measure went down in 2017 compared to 2016. But do two data points really help us understand what the real trend is? This blog post explores an approach we can use to make better decisions about our data.

The post Two Data Points Don’t Make a Trend, So Read Beyond the Headline appeared first on Lean Blog.