Tag: Leadership

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Healthcare is the world's largest cottage industry, as evidenced by the enormous variation in practice.  Healthcare practitioners may finally be...

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Hospitals have been collecting patient complaint data for decades, but leveraging the data for improvement has remained elusive.  Some new...

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients The benefits of Electronic healthcare records are a polarizing topic with healthcare providers.  Standardization and electronic workflows have their...

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patient A lot can be done to optimize flow in hospitals without investing in additional staff and infrastructure by using an...

Tomislav Mihaljevic, MD was named CEO of the Cleveland Clinic just over a year ago, replacing long-time CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD. As I've blogged about (and podcasted about), I've been impressed with the Cleveland Clinic Improvement Model and their approach to continuous improvement, problem solving, and Lean management. Dr. Mihaljevic has written a blog post about the power of "tiered huddles"...

This article from the WSJ caught my eye last week (might be behind their paywall): The Best Bosses Are Humble Bosses Organizations are making a push to hire and promote workers who lead effectively but don't seek the spotlight In today's post, I share some thoughts and related reading...

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patient CMAJ summarizes how to improve the quality of healthcare in Canada.  Nothing new here, which begs the question - what...

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.

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patient Creating value for patients isn't a "project".  Lean thinking isn't a program you "implement" in a hospital over a...

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patient The legendary quality leader W. Edwards Deming is widely known for his thoughts on statistics and systems.  However, Deming...

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patient Canadian healthcare is where "pilot projects come to die".  There is a lack of a culture of innovation in Canadian...

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.