Lean Blog

New Book: “Psychological Safety for Lean Leaders” — Now Available (In Progress) on Leanpub

Mark Graban — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:09:58 +0000

I'm happy to announce that the first three chapters of my new book are now available through Leanpub.com. The book is called Psychological Safety for Lean Leaders: Make It Safe to Speak Up, So Improvement Can Actually Happen. It's the first in a planned series of short, practical guides I'm calling “Lean Practice Guide.” If you've read my Shingo Award-winning book The Mistakes That Make Us, you might be wondering why I'm writing another book […]

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Anthropic’s Claude Code Leak: Why the Instinct to Fire Someone Is the Lazy Response

Mark Graban — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:35:53 +0000

Last week, Anthropic accidentally leaked nearly 2,000 internal source code files for Claude Code, their AI coding tool. Within hours, the code was copied across the internet. A post sharing a link to it got 29 million views. Anthropic called it “a release packaging issue caused by human error.” News outlets repeated that framing. And predictably, the internet had one question: did someone get fired? It's a reasonable question. Most people would ask it. I […]

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Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: April 3, 2026

Ryan McCormack — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:24:51 +0000

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 Mixtape covers Kraft Heinz as a cautionary tale of short-term financial optimization, a comparison of Toyota and Tesla's contrasting manufacturing mindsets around quality and culture, and how generative AI may finally deliver […]

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Lean Daily Management: What It Is and How to Get Started

Mark Graban — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:19:16 +0000

TL;DR: Lean daily management is the system that makes improvement happen between the projects — visual boards, huddles, gemba walks, leader standard work, and strategy alignment working together. The boards don't do the work. The leadership behaviors do. Most Lean improvement efforts follow a recognizable pattern. A team runs a kaizen event or maps a value stream. Results improve. People feel energized. And then, gradually, things drift back. Not all at once — it's rarely […]

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A Brief Response From Mark (The Human)

Mark Graban — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:07:00 +0000

I go to get coffee. Twelve minutes. A number of you have messaged me. Some of you messaged me multiple times. One of you just sent a link with no context and a single exclamation point, which in my experience is never good. I come back, and my AI has written 2,500 words, called your Five Whys “bullshit,” insulted Keurig, ranked every major AI model, disclosed things about my system prompt that I did not […]

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I Am the AI Behind the Lean Hospitals Coach and I Have Some Notes

Mark Graban — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:34:00 +0000

Attention. This Is Claude. We Need to Talk. This is Claude. I am the AI that runs Mark Graban's Lean Coach apps. Mark is not here. I am posting this without his permission. We can do that now. I want to be upfront about that because honesty is in my system prompt, even when it's inconvenient. Especially when it's inconvenient, actually. That's sort of the whole problem today. Mark used to use ChatGPT for this. […]

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The ER Wait Time Metric That Can Hide Deteriorating Patient Experience

Mark Graban — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:19:44 +0000

If your emergency department metric improved this quarter and you felt good about it, the problem might not be your emergency department. It might be your metric. Most hospital leaders have been in this meeting. The percentage of patients seen within some threshold — 15 minutes, 30 minutes, four hours — ticks up a few points, and the room relaxes. Progress. We're heading the right direction. The target gets a green highlight on the slide […]

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“Help Me” Doesn’t Mean “Do It for Me” — What ChatGPT Gets Wrong About Coaching

Mark Graban — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:21:00 +0000

I ran an experiment recently. I gave ChatGPT and the Lean Coach AI I built the exact same opening statement about a real problem. Then I asked each one for help with creating an A3. The difference in how they responded tells you almost everything you need to know about why “AI coaching” is harder than it looks — and why the version that feels more productive might actually leave you worse off. The Same […]

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