Shows / Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Episodes
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Building an AI Email Filter With ChatGPT: A Kaizen Experiment
Another email arrives about a potential podcast guest. I haven't responded to the first pitch, but the sender wants to make sure it didn't get lost in my…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
The Danaher Business System Page Talks About Speed. Where Did Safety and Quality Go?
Danaher has been one of the most cited Lean success stories in the United States for decades. The story usually starts at Jacobs Manufacturing (Jake Brake) in…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
When “I Have a Pulse” Gets Dismissed: A Toddler Found Alive in a Hospital Morgue
On Super Bowl Sunday in February, an 18-month-old boy was pulled from his family's pool in Gilbert, Arizona, and rushed to Mercy Gilbert Medical Center. He was…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: October 23, 2026
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Signals & Levers: Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi on Change Theater, Open Loops, and Systems Thinking for Software Teams
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guests for Episode #550 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Why People Stay Silent at Work: My New Psychological Safety Course
Someone in a meeting sees a problem coming. Maybe it's a risk in the plan, an assumption that doesn't hold up, or a direction that doesn't feel right. They…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Creating a Continuous Improvement System in Accounting: Nick Katko on PDCA, Culture, and Psychological Safety
Accounting teams see problems every day. As Nick Katko puts it, they fix them, but they don't necessarily solve them. We talk about what a continuous…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Peter Pronovost on Leading with Love: What the Checklist Needed All Along
I recently recorded an upcoming episode of the Lean Blog Interviews podcast with Dr. Peter Pronovost, the Chief Quality and Clinical Transformation Officer at…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Fear-Based Leadership Worked at Volkswagen. Until It Didn’t.
In July 2013, on a test drive in the United States, Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagen, noticed a paint imperfection on a Beetle. The paint was slightly…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
A Lean Management System That Doesn’t Depend on the Lean Team — Emily Swaney, OhioHealth
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Assembly-Line Nursing Was Meant to Be Temporary
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
The Toyota Andon System in South Africa: Two Buttons Instead of a Cord
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: September 25, 2026
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
A British Hospital Missed a Killer for Two Years. The Recommendations Are Mostly Hardware.
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
What The Rehearsal Gets Wrong About Pilots–and Right About Leadership Training
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Training as a Countermeasure? The “Fix” You Can Finish by Friday.
In 2006, regulators cited a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin for six violations of state and federal rules after a patient died — three federal, three…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
What 21,050 Clinicians Told Us About Fear and Futility
Hospitals have Quiet Rooms now. There's soft lighting. There's a chair. There's a noise machine, which is a machine that makes calming noises. There's…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
GM Adopted Forced Ranking in 2024. Ford Dropped It in 2001.
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: September 4, 2026
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Three Weeks to Act on a Nurse’s Patient Safety Concerns
For three weeks after his surgery, a patient at the Royal Oldham Hospital (England) had no bowel movement and was in increasing pain. The ward sister kept…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
What I Tell People Who Want to Write a Book About Lean
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Larry Culp on Resistance to Lean: Compliance Isn’t Belief
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
You Came Back From the Training Ready. Nobody Around You Could Change a Thing.
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
When “Human Error” Is the Root Cause, the Investigation Stopped Early
Tennessee regulators released an eighty-page report this week on the medication error at Ascension Saint Thomas Midtown in Nashville, where four patients…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
The Independent Double Check and the Risk of Human Error
A nurse on a telemetry floor had two orders to carry out. Forty milligrams of Lasix, to be given via IV. Two units of insulin lispro, given subcutaneously. At…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: August 21, 2026
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Four Patients Got the Wrong Drug in Nashville. Ask a Better Question.
On August 14, four patients went to Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital Midtown in Nashville for joint replacement surgery. All four were harmed during the…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Ten Psychological Safety Outcomes, and What They Do and Don’t Prove
The second revised (and expanded) edition of Timothy R. Clark's The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety came out this week. My copy showed up yesterday, and I've…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Larry Culp on Success Theater, Embracing Red, and the GE Turnaround
GE was in bad enough shape in 2018 that investor Nelson Peltz says he was sure the company would end up in Chapter 11. Inside GE, meanwhile, business reviews…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Toyota Doesn’t Call It Lean? Its Own Websites Say Otherwise
Somebody says it in the comments of nearly every post about Lean, usually with a few exclamation points. “Toyota doesn't call it Lean!” It gets…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
What If Every Hospital Learned From Every Other Hospital’s Safety Incidents?
On Thursday, I wrote about the death of Donald Gough at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. He received insulin during liver surgery even though he…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
An Insulin Error Killed a Hospital Patient. How Does Every Other Hospital Learn From It?
A man named Donald Gough died in a Cardiff hospital in November 2022, four weeks after an insulin error during surgery. He was 77, a retired NHS radiographer…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Toyota Copied Ford’s Suggestion System–and Got Far Better Results
I've been reading The Birth of Lean, a collection of talks and interviews with the people who helped build the Toyota Production System. One passage stood out…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
“Most People Wouldn’t”: Fear, Gratitude, and Reporting Medical Errors
Somebody on the r/nursing subreddit asked what the worst medication error was that people had seen or heard about. Almost six hundred replies came in. I've…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
GE Aerospace’s Greenville Plant Proves Larry Culp’s “Safety First” Wasn’t Just Talk
Three years ago, I wrote about GE CEO Larry Culp's habit of beginning every investor meeting with a safety briefing and his insistence that the company's…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: August 7, 2026
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Thirty Years Later, “Keep the Line Running” Is Still the Message
When I was a young engineer at GM's Livonia Engine Plant in the mid-1990s, I wrote down some of the things production workers said to me. One of them stuck, a…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Highlights From Five Conversations With Karen Martin
Karen Martin has been on my Lean podcast five times over 12 years, talking through clarity, value stream mapping, whether Lean is dead, and mistake-proofing…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Outcome Bias, Near Misses, and Two Vials of Vecuronium
tl;dr: A nurse nearly administered vecuronium instead of vancomycin but caught the error before it reached the patient. The near miss shows how outcome bias…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Where Was Toyota’s First Andon Cord?
For years, I've been asking a very specific question about Lean history: Where was Toyota's first andon cord? Jeff Liker didn't know. Neither did Isao Yoshino…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Hyundai’s Humanoid Robots, GM Layoffs, Jim Farley’s Ford Quality Turnaround, and Toyota Kaizen for Coffee Farmers
Formerly known as “Lean Whiskey” Listen: In Season 2, Episode 9, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh recap the World Cup, declare a “dealer's…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Do 90% of Lean Transformations Really Fail? I Went Looking for the Number
The Lean transformation failure rate might be the longest-running meme in our field. You have seen the claim on LinkedIn, in keynotes, and in consulting decks…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Workplace Deaths by Age: Why Counts and Rates Tell Different Stories
A pitch from a personal injury law firm showed up in my inbox. The subject line was about older workers dying on the job. The numbers were real. I checked them…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
A Locked Complaint Box in Greece: Learning From Customer Complaints, or Just Bureaucracy?
I just got back from a vacation that included some time in Greece. On the way to the airport, we stopped for a slow, delicious breakfast at a seaside cafe…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
If This Were Assembly Line Medicine, You Could Stop the Line
A nurse executive posted on LinkedIn this week about what she called “assembly-line medicine.” She was describing an ambulatory surgery center…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: July 24, 2026
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Four Headers, Zero Metrics: An Empty Huddle Board in the ICU Hallway
A close family member spent time in a hospital ICU recently. The clinical care, as far as I could tell, was excellent. The nurses were attentive. The…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Toyota’s 1992 View: Standardized Work and Kaizen Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Most Lean programs treat standardized work and kaizen as opposites. Standardized work is the rigid part. Kaizen is the creative part. One constrains, the other…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
What the First Twelve Years of Writing About Sports Taught Me About Leadership
I've been pulling together a slightly updated edition of my eBook collecting the sports-related posts from this blog. The earliest post in it is from October…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
20 Years Of Lean Podcasting, Thanks to Norman Bodek
Twenty years ago, on July 16, 2006, the Lean Blog Podcast began with a conversation with Norman Bodek. Norman was my friend and mentor–and the person who…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
A Bending Column, a Bad Answer, and the Real Test of a Speak-Up Culture
Sean Dow was on the 22nd floor of a Manhattan high-rise last week, working on the building's sprinkler system, when he noticed something wrong with the…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
We Thought We Solved That: The Art and Judgment Calls in the PDSA Cycle
An executive says, after hearing about a major quality defect: “You said we solved that. Why'd the problem come back???” That might sound like an…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
The First Three Seconds After Someone Admits a Mistake
Someone walks into your office and says, “We have a problem.” Notice what your body does before your brain catches up. A small tightening. A breath…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: Best of First Half of 2026
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…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
Do Not Remove: What a Kaizen Binder Taught Me in Japan
On a factory table in Japan, in December 2019, there was a binder. White cover, the word KAIZEN in big orange letters, a photo of cherry blossoms underneath…
- Lean Blog by Mark Graban
What Toyota’s 1992 Booklet Leaves Out About Leadership
The 1992 Toyota booklet says surprisingly little about leadership. There's a Kiichiro Toyoda quote about engineers getting their hands dirty. There's a brief…