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Emily Swaney, VP of Operational Excellence at OhioHealth, explains how a Lean Promotion Office of 11 people supports a Lean management system for 35,000 associates. The approach relies on developing leaders as problem-solving coaches and on connecting daily huddles and frontline KPIs to what the organization measures.
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better. Today's mixtape looks at leading through constant change, including
When the door from the office area opened onto the production floor at Toyota's plant in Durban, South Africa, I heard a familiar sound from other Toyota plants I've visited: the andon music. Earlier this month, before speaking at the KZN Lean Conference, I spent time at the plant learning how the Toyota andon system w
There's a nursing model where one nurse passes medications to every patient on the unit and does nothing else. Another nurse does treatments. An aide does baths and vital signs. Nobody is responsible for a patient. Everybody is responsible for a task. Nursing textbooks call it assembly line nursing. The formal name is
Season 2 of The Rehearsal opens in a cockpit. Two pilots are on final approach. The first officer thinks they're lined up wrong and says so, mildly. The captain brushes it off. The first officer tries again, a little more nervous this time, and the captain keeps descending. Then the alarms, a go-around attempted too la
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better. This week's Operational Excellence Mixtape connects stories from EY,
Twice in the past two weeks, I have talked with people who want to write a book about Lean. Both were early in the process and trying to figure out what they were signing up for. I've had a lot of these conversations over the years. I enjoy doing them and this blog post is not meant to replace future chats. Those conve
In early 2025, Eric Veiel asked Larry Culp a question that most Lean deployment articles skip: when you're getting ready to implement one of these programs, is there some hesitation from the workforce? Culp didn't argue with the premise. “Well, I think everybody, once you get to a certain age, right, is not necessarily
You came back with real energy. You'd seen how the work could be. You had notes, a few ideas, maybe a plan you'd already started sketching on the drive home. Then you walked back into the same building, run by the same people who weren't in the room with you, and within a couple of months the energy was gone. You could
I'm traveling internationally for ten days and I turned on one of the British news channels. There's a major story about NHS England. First, the awful reality that a nurse would willfully kill babies in the NICU. Then, the second (and more believable) reality that bad management systems (and poor leadership) made the s
In 2006, regulators cited a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin for six violations of state and federal rules after a patient died — three federal, three state. They threatened its license and its Medicare contract. The hospital updated its policies and re-educated its nurses, and the citations were withdrawn. Training as a
Phoebe Wall Howard reported recently that a fired GM engineer is suing the company over its employee evaluation system. Tuan Le, 58, spent 27 years at General Motors, moving from industrial engineer to senior throughput simulation engineer. GM terminated him on January 17, 2026. He is the third GM employee represented
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