Tag: Kaizen

I'm excited that our sold-out "Symposium on Learning Organizations" group will be visiting Toyota's San Antonio plant on Wednesday. Later that day, we'll be touring the Garrison Brothers Distillery and, on Thursday, we are using their "barrel barn" as a venue for "Open Space" discussions, the Red Bead Experiment, and more. We have a group of 40 from many industries attending and we might run a similar event in a different location in the future. I've blogged about Garrison Brothers and my stint as a bottling line volunteer before... In that post, I shared pictures of me working to dip bottles of bourbon into a sealing wax. I was wearing a winter coat because it was February in Texas and there was a bit of snow and ice that week. When I was back there recently, I saw some additional improvements that seem like "Kaizen" to me. 

I'm very excited to be leaving for Japan for another study trip in just over a month. This will be my second trip this year, this time with Honsha, after previous (and hopefully future) trips organized by Kaizen Institute. Even though the previous tours have been focused on Toyota, as well as Lean and Kaizen in various organizations, one common thread is Total Quality Management, or TQM. In many Japanese organizations, TQM has been a solid foundation of practice for two or three decades, where it tended to be a fad here in the U.S., as I've blogged about:

Some colleagues recently sent me a Harvard Business Review article that has a fairly accusatory title, although many readers might think it applies to other managers: Most Managers Don't Know How to Coach People. But They Can Learn. It's a common dynamic for people to overstate their own abilities. When it comes to "coaching" in the workplace:

Somebody pointed Dominic Rubino to me as somebody who could be a guest on his podcast. His podcast is focused on cabinet makers and woodworkers. I don't know anything about that field. But, I think our conversation goes to show that concepts of Lean, Kaizen (continuous improvement), and practices for metrics are pretty transferrable across industries.

This post builds off of a little rant I went on over on LinkedIn. I wrote: The Catch-22 of "Lean" training and "implementation"... Executives want big returns and high ROI. That's understandable. But, at the core of Lean, if you're going to call it that, is "#Kaizen," which means allowing everybody to do small improvements even if there isn't big ROI.

Thanks to posting about the trip on LinkedIn, I learned that Mike Bukowski is now working for Sazerac, the parent company of Buffalo Trace, in a process improvement role. Last year, Mike attended the site visit and class that Joe Swartz and I hosted at Franciscan St. Francis Health. Mike has embraced might call "lessons from Toyota," as taught to healthcare people, and is now training and coaching people who make some very fine bourbon, including Aaron Krentz, Processing Supervisor (at right).

Recently, I stumbled across some video of me and Dr. Greg Jacobson giving a talk at a health system. I think it's from 2013. So, I'm sharing this as a "Throwback Thursday." KaiNexus software has changed and evolved a lot in five years as the company has grown. Kaizen, or continuous improvement, principles and practices are timeless.

Today, I'm giving a talk at the International Society for Blood Transfusion (ISBT) conference in Toronto. I was invited by the company Quotient to participate in a panel presentation and discussion with some laboratory professionals from the U.S. and the U.K. The others are presenting examples of how they have improved flow, productivity, and quality in blood collection and hospital blood bank settings. Lean often gets portrayed as just being about efficiency or flow, when Toyota's definition of the Toyota Production System talks about how flow and quality go hand in hand. I was specifically asked to give a short talk titled, "What Do Cars Have to Do With Healthcare? How to Adopt and Adapt Lessons From Manufacturing."

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."

Mark's Note: Today's post is the first guest post by Jess Orr, who you might remember from the webinars that she did for KaiNexus. I hope you enjoy the post... As a continuous improvement practitioner, I recently faced a challenge that seemed nearly insurmountable.

Last week, I wrote Part 1 of this piece about TQM and "Small Kaizen" at a Japanese Hospital pharmacy. The hospital was happy that employees were participating in their "Small Kaizen" process, but there was a month in which they saw the number of submitted Kaizens drop, from about 138 to 58 or so. As I write about in Measures of Success, two data points usually don't make a trend.

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?