Lean Blog

Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: June 12, 2026

Ryan McCormack — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:28:21 +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. Ryan McCormack's June 12 Mixtape covers five themes: AI as growth engine (IKEA, HSBC), the risk of operational excellence becoming a strategic blind spot, the recurring “brilliant jerk” hiring trap, common decision-rights failures in […]

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A Prize for Variation? What the NHS Backlog Leaderboard Actually Rewards

Mark Graban — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:21:36 +0000

TL;DR: The NHS backlog gets narrated one month at a time, and millions in bonus money ride on the moves. A Process Behavior Chart shows most movement is noise — and the trusts that stay on top are running structurally different systems. The leaderboard rewards everything except what it claims to measure. Say you manage an NHS trust, and last March you hit the four-hour A&E target hard enough to land in the top ten […]

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When a Lean Leader Admits He Doesn’t Know What He’s Doing, with Gary Peterson

Mark Graban — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:11:00 +0000

Gary Peterson spent almost 40 years helping O.C. Tanner build a continuous improvement culture, work that earned the company the Shingo Prize in 1999. He joins me to talk about psychological safety, autonomy, leading change from the middle, and the hardest story he tells about himself. Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #546 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Gary Peterson, recently retired from O.C. Tanner, where […]

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When Behavioral Nudges Help Patients, and When They Cover for a Broken Process

Mark Graban — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:50:00 +0000

TL;DR: Behavioral nudges can produce real gains in patient experience at almost no cost. They can also be used to dress up a process that should have been fixed. The discipline for CI leaders is knowing the difference and getting the sequence right. Fix the process first. Use behavioral framing to amplify what works, not to hide what does not. The Lean instinct, when patients complain about waiting, is to fix the wait itself. Reduce […]

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AI Didn’t Invent Lean Slop. It Learned It From Us.

Mark Graban — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:48:56 +0000

I have been seeing more AI-generated Lean infographics on LinkedIn lately. So many. It's annoying. I try not being annoyed, but it's hard. So, I made one of my own about the trend and posted it on LinkedIn. It collects six confident, wrong claims of the kind that fill these graphics. Call it Lean slop. When I see claims like those, the wrongness jumps out. What gets me is how familiar every one of them […]

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Admitting Mistakes Is Not Enough: The Leadership Lesson Behind the Burger King and Domino’s Ads

Mark Graban — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:41:00 +0000

TL;DR: Burger King, T-Mobile, and Domino's have all built ad campaigns around the same confession: our product was bad, but it's better now. The marketing is interesting. The leadership lesson is better. In each case, the harsh verdict comes from a customer rather than the brand's own scorecard, and the apology only works because the company fixed the underlying problem first. The same pattern applies inside any organization trying to build psychological safety. Admitting mistakes […]

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You’re Not Hiring Talent. You’re Renting It.

Mark Graban — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:31:31 +0000

You finally found the perfect hire. The one who did this exact job, at a company just like yours, for six years. No training required. You felt the relief of it. Someone who already knows the work, who can start Monday and contribute by Friday. Six months later, you notice something. They still speak about problems, and solve them, the way their old company did. They reach for habits you've spent years trying to move […]

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What Toyota’s 1992 Booklet Says About Stopping the Line, and What It Leaves to You

Mark Graban — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:02:30 +0000

Picking up the thread from the previous post on Toyota's April 1992 publication “The Toyota Production System.” This one's about the line-stop rope or andon cord. The booklet describes the mechanism with care. From the jidoka section: “The ‘fixed-position stop system' is a classic example of jidoka. In that system, a worker anywhere on the assembly line who notices an abnormality can stop the production flow by pulling on a rope overhead or by pushing […]

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