Tag: Kaizen

Kaizen: Daily Improvement, Learning, and Leadership in Practice

Kaizen is often misunderstood as small ideas or isolated improvement events. In practice, Kaizen is a daily, people-centered approach to learning and improving work—supported by leadership, good systems, and psychological safety. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and real-world examples of Kaizen in action, across healthcare and other industries, with a consistent focus on leadership behaviors, respect for people, and learning from problems rather than hiding them.

What’s the One Common Feature on These Suggestion Boxes?

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Today's post is a short one, a bit of a visual puzzler and a reader participation post (leave a comment!). If you were in the...

An Unexpected Lean Thinker and her “Kaizen Lifestyle”: Maria Menounos

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I stumbled across a surprising use of the word "kaizen" the other day from a surprising source - TV entertainment reporter and actress Maria...

What Is Yokoten? Why Copy-and-Improve Beats Copying Exactly in Lean

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TL;DR: Yokoten spreads learning horizontally so teams can go see, think, and build on ideas--not blindly copy them. Mark's Note: Today's post is from Al...

Management Journal Article about Children’s Medical Center Dallas

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I am happy to share, with permission, a new journal article that I co-authored with Jim Adams ("The Synthesizer"), the senior director of laboratory...

Lean Culture Starts with Trust: Why Fear Kills Improvement

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As I'm going through revisions of my book, Lean Hospitals, a theme jumps out at me in Chapter 2.... it's all about trust. The first...

Lean, Value & Waste: Better to be Creative than to Cheat...

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I saw this article last week in the USA Today while traveling, with the online headline "Products nipped, tucked to save." That headline makes...

Why Setting Targets for the Number of Kaizen Ideas Usually Backfires

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When an organization sets a target for the number of kaizen ideas employees should submit, it usually gets exactly what it asked for --...

Survey: Title & Subtitle for My Second Book on “Kaizen” and...

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Hi - As a reader of my blog, your input and thoughts are important to me. I am currently co-authoring a new book with Joe...

From the LEI Summit: Mike Rother on Toyota’s View on ROI

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I really had a great learning experience at last week's LEI Lean Transformation Summit that was held here in Dallas. The event sold out...

Guest Post: From Ad-Hoc to Systematic Change: A Framework for Kaizen...

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Mark's note: I'm happy to have a new guest blogger, Dr. Wiljeana Glover, from MIT, and a fellow member of the Society for Health...

What Are Barriers to “Kaizen” in Healthcare?

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Regular readers might know that I'm working on a second book project, about "kaizen" (continuous improvement) in healthcare. Sign up to receive more info...

Funny ‘Family Guy’ Clip that Illustrates Disdain for Manufacturing; Plus a...

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Friday, I blogged about a WIRED Magazine piece by Joel Johnson that was pretty disrespectful of manufacturing, in general, as he wrote that "every...
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