Lean Blog Interviews: Real-World Lean Leadership Conversations in Healthcare and Beyond

My guest for Episode #338 is Mr. Grey Dube, the Chief Executive Officer at Leratong Hospital. He has over 40 years' experience in the Public Service, including time as CEO since 2005. Leratong Hospital is an 855 bedded regional hospital with over 1700 staff members, located in Mogale City, Krugersdorp, South Africa (just east of Johannesburg). Grey is the third consecutive hospital CEO guest, including Gladys Bogoshi (also from South Africa) and Vance Jackson (from the U.S.). I think it's interesting to hear similar philosophies and mindsets from these leaders. Like Gladys, Grey is going to be a keynote speaker at this year's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, to be held in Washington, DC on June 13 & 14. I'll be there and I hope you can join us. I'll also be teaching a pre-Summit workshop on Measures of Success that I hope you can attend. In this episode, we talk about how he got introduced to Lean and how he leads the Lean transformation efforts, including assessing and modeling behaviors including humility and self-discipline. How is he working to change the culture to one where all people are trained to be scientific problem solvers? Grey shares that, some of their success stories, some of their challenges, and more in this conversation.

It's my second straight podcast with a healthcare CEO. This time, joining me for Episode #337 is Vance Jackson, FACHE, FACMPE, the President & CEO of Davis Health System, based in Elkins, West Virginia. Vance and I talk about how he was admittedly skeptical about Lean at a previous healthcare organization. But, over time, he realized the importance of Lean and the need for him to lead differently — getting input from everybody instead of the old autocratic way that we see in so many healthcare organizations. How does Vance lead by example as a CEO? Why is it so important for him to go to the “gemba” and observe the actual work and the workplace environment? We talk about all of that and more in this episode.

My guest for Episode #336 is Gladys Bogoshi, the Chief Executive Officer at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, one of the ten central hospitals in South Africa and the main teaching platform of the University of the Witwatersrand. The Hospital is situated in Johannesburg and has a bed capacity of 1189. Gladys is going to be a keynote speaker at this year's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, to be held in Washington, DC on June 13 & 14. I'll be there and I hope you can join us. I'll also be teaching a pre-Summit workshop on Measures of Success that I hope you can attend. In this episode, we talk about how she got introduced to Lean, some of the improvements that her hospital has driven in surgery, pharmacy, and other areas. What is her role as CEO in a Lean journey? What are some of the fundamental behaviors that are important and how you can coach people on those? We talk about all of that and more.

It's two Barrys in a row on the podcast, as my guest for Episode #335 is Barry O'Reilly and we're talking, in depth, about his latest book, Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results. Barry is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. See his full bio. Last week, I shared a shorter discussion with Barry that served as a preview of the webinar that he's presenting on Wednesday. You can find a link to register for the live webinar (or to view the recording) at leanblog.org/335. Barry and I chat about topics including 1) experimental approaches to entrepreneurship, 2) how leaders need to make it safe for people to try new things, and 3) why you have to unlearn before you can learn something new – that's the pathway that allows you to then achieve breakthrough results. These are good ideas in business and they also talk about the interesting case of tennis legend Serena Williams and how she reinvented her game to extend her greatness. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did and do hope you'll pick up the book.

Joining me for Episode #334, all the way from Australia, is Barry McCarthy. Barry spent more than 15 years in leadership roles with Toyota in Australia and now works as an Associate with consulting firm Honsha. We were able to spend a lot of time talking when I participated in Honsha’s Executive Development Mission trip to Japan late last year. One thing we talked about quite a bit was Barry’s experience with Toyota being “a development company,” as I blogged about here. In our discussion, Barry talks about why he was “skeptical” about Lean before he joined Toyota. But, he evolved as Toyota continues to evolve. Why is Barry afraid that Lean (outside of Toyota) might get stuck in the past? We’ll talk about all of that and more.

Episode 333 - Jean-Marc Legentil and Marc-Olivier Legentil, The Toyota Kata Memory Jogger My guests for Episode #333 are Jean-Marc Legentil and Marc-Olivier Legentil, father-and-son Lean consultants from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. They work together in the firm Bell-Nordic Consulting. I've had the pleasure of meeting both of them on numerous trips to Montreal and was happy to hear they were part of the team that created the latest book in the excellent “Memory Jogger” series: The Toyota Kata Memory Jogger I hope you enjoy our conversation about Toyota Kata, improvement, leadership, and more.

Joining me today for Episode #332 is Jason Burt, owner of EHIP Consulting. Jason is a Lean consultant and business coach with an extensive and diverse background, including a manufacturing career where he has led and coached organizations to increased levels of efficiency and performance. Using the Toyota Production System (TPS) approach has allowed him to positively change cultures to achieve sustainable improvements. During his time at Herman Miller, Jason spent 18 months learning TPS directly from Toyota as a Toyota Lean Consultant. Toyota and Herman Miller were in a partnership during his time with the company, which allowed him to receive direct coaching from Toyota Senseis for the entire 16 years. I was interested in talking with Jason about what it was like learning from Toyota's TSSC organization (a group that has done great work with a UCLA eye clinic and a food bank, to name two that I've featured on the blog). We talk about a wide range of topics, including common misunderstandings about TPS and Lean, the Toyota goals of developing people and their clients (knowing results will follow), and how he sometimes has to adapt to work with clients and their expectations. I hope you enjoy the conversation!

My guest today for Episode #331 is Eric W. Dickson, MD, MHCM, FACEP, a Professor of Emergency Medicine at UMass Medical School and Chief Executive Officer of the UMass Memorial Health Care system. Episode page with links and more You might have heard Dr. Dickson speak in Episode #231 of the podcast, which was audio from the CEO panel at the 2015 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. By the way, I hope you can join me at this year's Summit. In that audio, Dr. Dickson talked about the beginning of what has been quite an impressive turnaround at UMass Memorial Health Care. I invited him to formally be a guest on the podcast to talk about their progress, and what it means for him to be creating a culture of “Everyday Innovators: Everywhere, Every Day,” which has led to over 65,000 ideas being implemented in five years. This is also a topic he blogs about quite a bit. In our conversation, we discuss how he found Lean originally “almost out of desperation.” How can we shift from “knowing the answer” to “continuous experiments?” Why is it important that he, as CEO, not be “throwing solutions out” when working with people? Does it help that he works a few shifts a month as an emergency medicine doc? We talk about that and more.

Joining me today for Episode #330 of the podcast is Christoph Roser, a professor of production management at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in Germany. He has decades of experience with Lean manufacturing including time with Toyota in Japan, as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, and as a Lean expert and manager at Robert Bosch GmbH. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. He is author of the book Faster, Better, Cheaper in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond. You can read his full bio here, via his excellent blog AllAboutLean.com. Today's discussion was sparked by his series of blog posts about his “grand tour” of automotive factories in Japan. You can read those or check out his overview blog post here. We'll talk about the differences between some of these companies, a bit about Lean in healthcare, and we'll discuss Christoph's concerns about the way Toyota's culture might be changing under CEO Akio Toyoda.

Joining me today for Episode #329 of the podcast is Mike Eisenberg, the director, editor, and producer of the film “To Err is Human,” a documentary about the incredibly important issue of patient safety. The film shares a title with the groundbreaking 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine. The film is available on as a digital download (through iTunes and other platforms) and a Blu-ray or DVD (through Amazon) and there also screenings taking place around the country (and you can arrange one at your organization). In our conversation, Mike and I talk about the scale and breadth of patient safety problems, some of the systemic causes, and some of the solutions that are being tried and used in healthcare. The term “Lean” is not a part of the film, but Mike said he's become aware of the alignment between Lean and systemic patient safety improvement, but there are limitations to what could be put into a 77-minute film. But, there are common themes including not blaming “bad apples” and improving the way care is delivered in a systematic way. I had the opportunity to watch the film before the interview — it's very powerful and well produced. I hope you'll check out the film, whether you are a patient or a healthcare professional (or leader). It's important that we help the public understand that patient safety can't be taken for granted… and it's important that hospitals step up their efforts on this front.