Lean Blog

MLB Walks Are Up With Robot Umpires. The Skill Is Knowing What to Ignore.

Mark Graban — Wed, 13 May 2026 01:11:30 +0000

MLB's first month with robot umpires gave us a 7.3% jump in walks, a five-minute increase in average game time, and a series of headlines asking you to have an opinion. Most of the leaders I respect would shrug. That isn't apathy. It's a skill, and it's harder than it looks. When a workplace metric jumps 7.3% in a month, the reflex is to do something. Praise. Punish. Call a meeting. Most journalists write the […]

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What a “Perfect” Process Map Missed: A Lesson From Third Shift

Mark Graban — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:32:00 +0000

A food company had a flowchart any auditor would love. Every step mapped. Every step mapped. Every critical control point identified. The HACCP plan (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, the standard food safety framework that identifies where contamination can enter the process) reviewed, signed off, and approved by the people whose job it is to look for trouble. And then they had a major food safety failure. That's a story Deborah Coviello shared on […]

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What Jim Womack Kept Telling Us

Mark Graban — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:26:00 +0000

In March 2007, Jim Womack told me about his biggest disappointment. The Machine That Changed the World had been out for more than sixteen years, sold around a million copies, and was about to be reissued with an updated subtitle: “Why Toyota Won.” Jim was calling in from Melbourne, where he had been speaking about lean in healthcare. I asked why bother with a new edition. He answered, and then drifted toward something that seemed […]

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Mistakes and Leadership Lessons: Still Learning, Three Years Later

Mark Graban — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:55:30 +0000

Three years ago, The Mistakes That Make Us came out. Around the same time, Elisabeth Swan published Picture Yourself a Leader. Both books' third birthdays felt like a decent reason to get together and talk together and bring in some special guests. On Thursday, May 7, at 1 PM ET, Elisabeth and I co-hosted a live event on LinkedIn called “Still Learning: Mistakes and Leadership Lessons.” We talked about what readers have shared with us, […]

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A Bar Chart Said 24% Reduction — A Process Behavior Chart Said Something More Interesting

Mark Graban — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:26:00 +0000

Most hospital quality dashboards are designed to answer one question: Are we OK? Green means yes. Red means no. The trouble is, once the answer is green, nobody asks the more useful question: what did we do, and is it working? I watched this happen recently at an academic medical center. On screen was a dashboard showing monthly counts for five targeted inpatient harms — C. diff, CAUTI, CLABSI, falls with injury, and HAPI. A […]

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Belief vs. Compliance: Why Lean Still Struggles to Take Root

Mark Graban — Wed, 06 May 2026 07:42:00 +0000

TL;DR: Lean doesn't fail because people resist change. It struggles when organizations ask for participation without earning belief. Don Ephlin saw this decades ago: behavior changes when people believe, not when they're told to obey. That distinction still explains why some Lean efforts transform cultures while others quietly settle into compliance. I've been working my way through the Don Ephlin papers for a while now. Ephlin, the late UAW vice president and, for what it's […]

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The Most Expensive Person on Your Unit Is the One You Just Eliminated

Mark Graban — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:34:00 +0000

There's a hospital somewhere this quarter presenting a labor efficiency story to its board. A unit that used to have a dedicated charge nurse now has a “Working Charge Nurse” – someone who takes patients and runs the unit. The salary line is lower. The slide looks good. The board nods. Somewhere else in the same hospital, a different slide is being prepared for a different meeting. Turnover is up. Falls are trending the wrong […]

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Remembering Norm Bodek, 20 Years After Episode #1

Mark Graban — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:15:00 +0000

In July 2006, I pressed record on a conversation with Norm Bodek. The audio quality was poor. I had no idea what I was doing. Norman, who had spent decades going to Japan and had published Ohno and Shingo in English, was patient with me. “I want to thank you very much for doing this with me,” he said. “I think it's going to be a lot of fun.” That recording went up as Episode […]

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