Management Improvement Carnival #111

Again, I'm very happy to host the Carnival for  John Hunter and his  Curious Cat blog. My job here is to share some noteworthy and thought provoking posts from the past few weeks from the blogs I try to keep up with regularly. I hope you'll discover a new blog or two (or new idea) in the process.

My carnival focuses on a lot of good “lean healthcare” content, but not exclusively so…

• Lean in Alaska (Patrick Anderson) – “Milk and Change“: A healthcare CEO writes “Resistance to adopting lean healthcare as an management culture is declining. It needs to decline faster because, like resistance to pasteurization and refrigeration for milk, it is costing lives.
• “Improve With Me (Brian Buck) – “Fire At Will!“: Brian challenges the “burning platform” idea –– “Organizations need to work at aligning over lighting only a few platforms to get effective change for their performance.   Identify your organization's pyromaniacs to help them not set everything else on fire!”
• Lean Thinking in Healthcare (Marc Rouppe van der Voort) – “Book – Toyota Kata“: My friend Marc, from the Netherlands, gives his thoughts on the first three chapters of Mike Rother's book Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results.
• Daily Kaizen (Lee Fried) – “Teach Everyone the Business” – Lee, a lean facilitator at Group Health in Washington, writes “When I reflect on Health Care and my own organization I do not think we do a very good job at helping team members understand the financial side of the business.”
• Gemba Walkabout (Mike Stoecklein) – “Does the “Deming Connection” have a down side?” – My colleague from the Healthcare Value Leaders Network writes about his “last job” search and not getting a particular job, “The reason that she she was given from Acme was that my version of Lean (influenced by Dr. Deming) was thought to be incompatible with that of the external consultants who were helping them.”
• Doing Common Things Uncommonly Well (Anna Roth) – “A Culture of Safety: Forgiving” – A hospital CEO writes “I am not suggesting we forget harm or look away from difficult situations. I am suggesting we learn to forgive and not let it divide us as looking for blame will.”
• Running a Hospital (Paul Levy) – “Fishbones” – Yet another blogging hospital CEO says “But, the idea of Lean is to focus on the problem and not the person. This is not about blame. It is about a workplace environment that has evolved over the years — full of work-arounds and inefficiency and waste.”
• Evolving Excellence (Kevin Meyer) – “No Kidding, Bruce?” – “Create some additional value or do a better job of explaining the value, and maybe you'll be able to negotiate higher prices.”
• Curious Cat Management Blog (John Hunter) – “Manufacturing Jobs Increasing for First Time Since 1998 in the USA” – “I believe it is partially due to more companies rethinking off-shoring practices which are flawed and adopting lean manufacturing ideas.”
• LSS Academy (Ron Pereira) – “I Want to Be Like Benny” –   Describing a hospital employee he met during his dad's illness: “I've met many powerful business leaders including CEO's of multi-billion dollar companies… it's people like Benny that inspire me at this phase of my life.”
• JamieFlinchbaugh.com – “4 ways our value stream training may be different than yours” – “Building a map is never the point. The map itself is not magic. It does not give you the answer. The purpose of building the map is to generate a common understanding of the current state.”
• Lean Reflections (Karen Wilhelm) – “Leaner office processes at BCBSM” – “The emphasis at BCBSM, however, is not on event-based improvements, but on culture change.”

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