Tag: Culture

I'm very happy that my friend and long-time colleague Meghan Scanlon, a Principal with the firm Value Capture, presented a webinar that KaiNexus and...

My guest today for Episode #331 is Eric W. Dickson, MD, MHCM, FACEP, a Professor of Emergency Medicine at UMass Medical School and Chief...

Joining me today for Episode #330 of the podcast is Christoph Roser, a professor of production management at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences...

Joining me today for Episode #329 of the podcast is Mike Eisenberg, the director, editor, and producer of the film "To Err is Human," a...

Mark's Note: Today's post is written by Ken Segel, the managing director of Value Capture, LLC. This is the first of what I hope...

My guests for Episode #328 are Bette Gardner and Jeff Heil, of the company Breakthrough Learning. Bette is the creator of a fantastic simulation...

When I had the chance to go back to Japan last October with Honsha, there was a big focus on what the former Toyota...

It's a big week for American football. Monday was the College Football Playoff championship game. Alabama, led by Nick Saban and his "Process" were...

I'm happy to be hosting, via KaiNexus, another free webinar. Click the link below to register: How One Community Hospital is Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement November 28 from 1:00 - 2:00 pm ET Presented by Mike McGowan, Director of Process Excellence at Marietta Memorial Hospital This post also includes thoughts from the KaiNexus community about challenges and barriers to improvement and innovation.

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.

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.

My guest for Episode 311 is Jess Orr, a continuous improvement practitioner at WestRock, a large paper and packaging company, where she helps plants foster a culture of continuous improvement and employee engagement. \Her experience includes working directly for Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky. She is particularly passionate about sharing best practices across industries, which motivated her to found Yokoten Learning. In today's episode, we talk about her path from Six Sigma Black Belt to a Lean-thinking engineer at Toyota. How did she progress from solving problems herself to developing others? We'll talk about a blog post that she wrote for this blog earlier this year, Lean and ROI, leadership and culture, and much more. What is it like working outside of Toyota again? I hope you enjoy the discussion.