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.
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, fast learning, and no stubborn attachment to a bad idea. As someone who grew up as…
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, CEO of CareMore Health provides us with a sense of urgency and duty to close…
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 this, and I’m happy that anybody is willing to listen :-) We’ve done our second episode,…
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 system change or routine variation–helping leaders coach better, avoid blame, and focus improvement efforts where they…
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 applying the Toyota Production System as a management system–not just a set of tools–Virginia Mason improved…
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 pop-culture phenomenon in the past few years. I’ve seen some compare her process to the Lean…
Yesterday, I blogged about a CNO who was changing the culture at a hospital away from blaming individual nurses for system problems. The HealthLeaders article I wrote about didn’t talk about “Lean” per se. But, that single idea about moving…
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 — it must have been January 1994. My professor said something about Dr. Deming’s passing and…
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, 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).
Why do people fear change? Why are adults afraid of talking about their fears? My guest today is eminently qualified to answer such questions and to provide advice that can help us. My guest for Episode #315 is Robert Maurer, Ph.D., author of the outstanding book Mastering Fear.
Bob was previously my guest for Episode #153, where we discussed one of his earlier books on Kaizen, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. By the way, earlier this year I noticed that his other book The Spirit of Kaizen was one of the few books by an American author that Toyota was selling at the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology in Nagoya (see photo below).
I hope you enjoy today's discussion on Mastering Fear. As the subtitle says, can we "harness emotion to achieve excellence in health, work, and relationships"?
I'm excited to share two interesting opportunities to further our learning about Lean. One is a Texas-based event in September and the other is Japan-based, in October.
