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

My guests for Episode #328 are Bette Gardner and Jeff Heil, of the company Breakthrough Learning. Bette is the creator of a fantastic simulation called "Friday Night at the ER" -- which I've blogged about. When we recorded the webinar, Bette was CEO and Jeff was COO, but recently Jeff took over the CEO role. They are also, as they mention, mother and son... which will be followed by an upcoming podcast with a father and son team (two of the authors of this book). In this episode, we talk about Bette's inspiration for the simulation, systems thinking, and healthcare improvement. We'll also talk about how the simulation is used by organizations in many industries as a way of teaching systems thinking principles.

My guest for Episode #327 of the podcast is Marc Rouppe van der Voort, Ph.D., who is joining me from Utrecht in the Netherlands. We first met back in 2009 when he invited me to come speak at a Dutch Lean Healthcare conference (which I blogged about here). We've crossed paths many times, as Marc has frequently visited the U.S. for the annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, coming with a large group of Dutch Lean healthcare practitioners from many organizations (they collaborate through an organization he chairs called Lidz, which has 60 organizations as members). I've also had the chance to go back to visit and teach at Marc's current employer, St. Antonius Hospital, where he is vice president of operations management and leads the application of Lean principles and several supporting teams. He has also written three practical books on the application of Lean in healthcare. Today, we'll be talking about his learning and his experience with Lean in Dutch healthcare organizations -- what are the differences in the Dutch system and what are the ways in which it's similar to the American system? We'll also discuss the connections between Value Based Healthcare and Lean, with the focus on patient outcomes and quality of life... and other topics related to Lean and leadership.

Joining me for the fourth time, here for Episode #326 of the podcast, is my friend and colleague Katie Anderson, a leadership coach, Lean consultant, speaker and writer from the San Francisco area. Hear our previous podcasts about visiting and living in Japan. Today, we're talking about a number of topics related to learning and collaboration: Her upcoming book with Isao Yoshino, the local San Francisco Bay area AME consortium that she is leading, her next trip to Japan (which you can join), and more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as we did. For some other resources, and to enter to win a copy of my book Lean Hospitals (and a copy of Measures of Success) that Katie is giving away, visit kbjanderson.com/mark. Thanks, Katie!

Joining me for Episode #325 of the podcast is Andrea Hardaway, an operational leader and the executive director of the Association for Vocal Disorders. Andrea and I first crossed paths through LinkedIn, seeing what she shares there and vice versa. We also had a chance to visit a hospital together in Florida last year to learn about their Lean improvement work. We have enough professional interests in common, I thought it made sense to record a conversation and share it here with the listeners. Andrea has worked in manufacturing, healthcare, and other parts of the service sector and has seen common themes across industries. This includes the opportunity to better use metrics in a way that resonates with staff and is connected to improvement work, something I'm also very interested in. So, we talk about that and more in this episode.

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. Episode page: http://leanblog.org/324  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). I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

I first met Davis Balestracci at a conference a few years back, where I heard him give a very spirited and insightful presentation. That's why I'm happy to have him as my guest for Episode #323 of the podcast. We'll talk about a range of topics, including some of the key lessons that you'll find in his book (as a much deeper dive than we can get into here) Data Sanity: A Quantum Leap to Unprecedented Results (2nd edition). Davis has been a long-time columnist for Quality Digest, and you'll hear his thoughts on Process Behavior Charts, W. Edwards Deming, Lean Six Sigma, and more. From his bio: “Davis has a BS degree in chemical engineering and an MS degree in statistics, yet describes himself as a “right-brained” statistician:  his Myers-Briggs profile is INFP and he is a pipe organist who done graduate work in conducting.”

Today's podcast is a departure from the usual interview format. As I blogged about last week, the Lean community has lost a young, thoughtful, inquisitive, and reflective member -- Samuel Selay. I regret not having Sam on the podcast to talk about our learning and reflections. He was a guest of Ron Pereira's on the Gemba Academy podcast in 2016, talking about Lean in the Department of Defense. Today, I'm doing a reading of a blog post that Sam wrote for this site back in August. I'm also sharing the audiobook version of his chapter from the book Practicing Lean (which is read by our audiobook narrator). It's not his voice, but it's his words and thoughts. As the Marines say (Sam was an active duty Marine for 13 years), Semper Fi.  There is a GoFundMe page that was set up by Sam's sister-in-law to provide financial support to the family — his wife and four children under 18. I've donated and I hope you might consider doing the same. 

My guest for episode #321 of the podcast is Mark Hamel, He is a partner and COO with The Murli Group. Mark is a two-time recipient of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award for his books The Kaizen Event Fieldbook and his most recent book Lean Math, the main subject of this episode. I hope you enjoy the discussion, which is about people as much as it is about math.

Skip Steward, the Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care in Tennessee, was a guest on Episode #314 of the podcast talking about TWI and Toyota Kata in healthcare (he was joined by Brandon Brown). Today, I've asked Skip to come back and chat 1x1, in Episode #320, about his experience with Don Wheeler, learning from W. Edwards Deming, and more. I hope you enjoy his reflections, our discussions about healthcare, and connections to my book Measures of Success (Skip undoubtedly has a book in him too). 

My guest for Episode #319 is Karen Martin, whose most recent book is Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance. Episode page  She was previously a guest on Episodes #151, #190, and #285. Karen is an author of many books on Lean, quality, and performance excellence. She is also a speaker and a consultant with a B.S. in Microbiology from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. in Education from California State University, Bakersfield. Read her full bio. What is clarity? How can we work toward creating less fog and more clarity in organizations? We'll talk about that, along with a bit of discussion about clarity in metrics, as I write about in my book Measures of Success.