Tag: Deming

W. Edwards Deming: Leadership, Quality, and Continuous Improvement

W. Edwards Deming’s ideas about leadership, systems, variation, and psychology continue to shape how organizations pursue quality and improvement. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections exploring Deming’s teachings—and how they apply to Lean, healthcare, management, and continuous improvement today. Many of these posts challenge common misinterpretations of Deming’s work, emphasizing that quality cannot be delegated and that improvement starts with leadership.

Episode #4 of the “Lean Whiskey” Podcast: Nikka, Performance Reviews, KPIs,...

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After the last episode that had the first guest host (Chris Burnham), I'm once again joined by Jamie Flinchbaugh for another "Lean Whiskey" podcast. In...

MLB’s Home Run Surge: What the Data Really Shows (and Why...

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TL;DR: Home runs in MLB haven't just "gone up"--the data shows a real system shift, not random year-to-year variation. Process Behavior Charts help separate...

A PDSA Cycle in the Early Days of Baseball Uniforms

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TL;DR: Early baseball teams experimented with position-specific uniforms, quickly learned it created confusion, and abandoned the idea. It's a classic example of Plan-Do-Study-Adjust--small tests,...

Operational Excellence Mixtape: June 7, 2019

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Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Healthcare innovation is prone to continuous pilots of improvements that are already proven and a half-hearted embrace of meaningful change.  Sachin Jain,...

Episode #2 of the “Lean Whiskey” Podcast on GE, Boeing, and...

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Jamie Flinchbaugh and I got a great response to the first episode of our new "Lean Whiskey" podcast. We've had a great time with...

How Process Behavior Charts Improve OKRs (and Prevent Overreaction to Metrics)

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TL;DR: OKRs often fail because leaders react to month-to-month noise instead of real improvement. Process Behavior Charts (PBCs) show whether key results reflect true...

Dr. Gary Kaplan, Virginia Mason, and Lean’s Real “War on Waste”

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TL;DR: Dr. Gary Kaplan describes Virginia Mason's adoption of Lean as a "war on waste," but the real impact goes beyond waste reduction. By...

When Marie Kondo Meets Lean: What Family Guy Gets Right (and...

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I haven't read it, but Marie Kondo's book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has been a...

The CEO Leading the Culture Change at ZSFGH

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Yesterday, I blogged about a CNO who was changing the culture at a hospital away from blaming individual nurses for system problems. The HealthLeaders...

It’s Been 25 Years Since Dr. Deming Passed Away

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Today marks 25 years since W. Edwards Deming passed away in 1993. I remember sitting in a statistics class as an undergraduate at Northwestern University...

Podcast #323 – Davis Balestracci on “Data Sanity”

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I first met Davis Balestracci at a conference a few years back, where I heard him give a very spirited and insightful presentation. That's why I'm happy to have him as my guest for Episode #323 of the podcast. We'll talk about a range of topics, including some of the key lessons that you'll find in his book (as a much deeper dive than we can get into here) Data Sanity: A Quantum Leap to Unprecedented Results (2nd edition). Davis has been a long-time columnist for Quality Digest, and you'll hear his thoughts on Process Behavior Charts, W. Edwards Deming, Lean Six Sigma, and more.

Skip Steward on Deming’s Lessons, Don Wheeler, Process Behavior Charts, and...

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Skip Steward, the Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care in Tennessee, was a guest on Episode #314 of the podcast talking about TWI and Toyota Kata in healthcare (he was joined by Brandon Brown). Today, I've asked Skip to come back and chat 1x1, in Episode #320, about his experience with Don Wheeler, learning from W. Edwards Deming, and more. I hope you enjoy his reflections, our discussions about healthcare, and connections to my book Measures of Success (Skip undoubtedly has a book in him too). 
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