Tag: CEO

Tomislav Mihaljevic, MD was named CEO of the Cleveland Clinic just over a year ago, replacing long-time CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD. As I've blogged about (and podcasted about), I've been impressed with the Cleveland Clinic Improvement Model and their approach to continuous improvement, problem solving, and Lean management. Dr. Mihaljevic has written a blog post about the power of "tiered huddles"...

Jet lag, even well managed and planned for, meant I was awake early on a Sunday morning. Over breakfast, I read more about news from last week, that GE had fired their CEO John Flannery after 14 months and replaced him with a relatively new board member, Larry Culp. Culp is GE's first outsider CEO hire in their 100+ year history. So who is this guy and why did they hire him? Culp was CEO of Danaher, a company that's quite often held up as the best non-Toyota Lean company out there. And they're an American company. Danaher, through its Danaher Business System (DBS) approach, uses Lean as a business strategy in a way that's very different than Toyota. Danaher has acquired companies and brought DBS and Lean in as a way to turn around and improve those businesses.

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."

For a long time, I've been an advocate for the parallels between Lean and an approach called "Just Culture." See previous blog posts on this topic. Here's a good overview of Just Culture, which says, in part: "A just culture recognizes that individual practitioners should not be held accountable for system failings over which they have no control. A just culture also recognizes that many individual or active errors represent predictable interactions between human operators and the system in which they work. However, in contrast to a culture that touts no blame as its governing principle, a just culture does not tolerate conscious disregard of clear risks to patients or gross misconduct, such as falsifying a record, performing professional duties while intoxicated, etc."

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?

Today's post is my eighth cartoon collaboration with a skilled artist and medical assistant, Carrie Schurman (see past cartoons).  You can find her on Twitter as @carrieschurman.

Here are a few "quick hits" - similar to my "clearing the backlog" posts, quick quotes and links to articles you might find interesting. Unlike the "backlog," some of these stories I'm linking to are relatively fresh.

In today's post, I share and write about this message from Akio Toyoda that was posted online: “Making Ever-better Cars and Human Resource Development: The Forces That Power Sustainable Growth“

My guest for Episode #286 is Dean Gruner, MD, the recently retired CEO of ThedaCare, a health system in Wisconsin that has long been considered a worldwide leader in the practice of Lean in healthcare. See this article about his retirement, where he says "I've gotten more than I've given." Dean was previously my guest in Episodes 119 and 144 and I'm thrilled that he took time out of his retirement to talk with me about his lessons learned as he looks back on how ThedaCare's Lean journey has evolved, including some things he would consider to be missteps and challenges that they used as a springboard to get even better. I will also be releasing a separate episode where Dean talks about their experiences with Accountable Care Organizations (our topic from #144) and other "big picture" healthcare issues of the day. I'm including a full transcript along with a three-page PDF summary, as I've been doing recently.

In today's post, Jason Morin, from XPO Logistics, writes a review of Jim Lancaster's recent book "The Work of Management," published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. Jim Lancaster is CEO of Lantech and the book tells the story of their Lean journey and their evolution over time.

In this post, I share some thoughts and build upon one of the presentations at last week's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, where, Tim Pehrson, a regional CEO for Intermountain Healthcare, talked about how they piloted a continuous improvement process in one region... and how they're now spreading it throughout the system. This leads to confusion, in online discussion, about terms like projects, suggestions, ideas, and such...

For one last day, I'm at the 8th annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit in Palm Springs, California. See my notes from Day 1 in yesterday's...