Tag: Problem Solving

Healthcare - Creating Value for Patients Sometimes you just need to get a team together and improve.  Here's a good example of use of A3 thinking to...

I want to give credit to my friend and colleague Tony Milian for the idea that prompted this blog post. Tony and I used...

This ad caught my attention while watching a little bit of Monday Night Football this week. It's an IBM ad titled "Smart Loves Problems." The ad's...

Our guest today for Episode 348 is Cinnamon Dixon, Director Of Continuous Improvement at Cleveland Clinic. I interviewed her for the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement...

General Jim Mattis has been making the rounds to talk about his new book that is out today: Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead. "Learning...

I was invited to give a presentation on Process Behavior Charts and Measures of Success at Cleveland Clinic last week as part of their...

"The way we've always done it" doesn't mean that's the right way or the best way to do something. One of my daily habits is...

Please join us on May 16, as KaiNexus and I host a webinar presented by a leader from one of our customers -- Chad...

Mark's Note: I've known Ryan McCormack for many years now, thanks to his previous work in Lean healthcare and his attendance at Lean Healthcare...

My guest for Episode #324 of the podcast is Art Smalley. Art was one of the first Americans to work for Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan and, since then, has been helping other organizations with the Toyota Production System (a.k.a. "Lean") methods and approaches. You can also visit his website to learn more, www.ArtOfLean.com. Art is a fellow faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute. He has written two Shingo Publication Award-winning books: Creating Level Pull and (co-authored with Durward Sobek) Understanding A3 Thinking. Art later wrote Toyota's Kaizen Methods: Six Steps to Improvement with Isao Kato. I own all of these books and have only met Art briefly in the past, so I'm happy to finally have him here as a guest. Today, we'll talk about Art's career and his most recent book, Four Types of Problems, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute (note: LEI provided me a free electronic copy of the book).

Today's post is some material that I wrote for my book Measures of Success but cut due to length. I've modified the material a bit to hopefully be fine as a standalone post. There's a somewhat humorous, if not scary, story from a book (This is Going to Hurt) written by a former "junior doctor" in the British National Health Services (NHS) -- the equivalent of a "resident" in the American medical education system.

Back on the podcast for the fifth time is my friend David Meier, a Lean / TPS consultant who is a former Toyota leader at their plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. He's gotten into what's, perhaps, the most Kentucky of industries... distilling bourbon (and more). I'll have two more podcast episodes where David and I talk about bourbon, whiskey, and continuous improvement for almost 90 minutes total there. Those episodes are coming soon. Today is a shorter episode, where we catch up and hear more about what David has been doing since his last podcast appearance in 2010 when we talked about the challenges Toyota was facing then. In this episode, David drops a lot of knowledge and wisdom in a very short time -- thoughts on problem solving and how Lean thinking isn't easy for anybody, even if you're Japanese.