From the Editor

Welcome to the Lean CEO newsletter!

The featured article is Top 10 Signs Your CEO Does't Get Lean by Mike Micklewright. The featured book this month is Healthcare Kaizen by Mark Graban and Joseph Swartz.

Gemba Academy is continuing its free webinar series with the following:

• Lean in Higher Education with Bob Emiliani - 26 September
• Metrics in Lean with Michel Baudin - 24 October
• A Doctor's Perspective on Kaizen in Healthcare - Gregory Jacobson, MD and Mark Graban - 6 November

Once again I'll be speaking at the Lean Accounting Summit in mid-September. I hope to see you there! Another great conference coming up soon is the AME Annual Conference in October. Register soon!

- Kevin Meyer

Featured Article

Top 10 Signs Your CEO Doesn't Get Lean

By Mike Micklewright

Lean training and programs are more popular than ever. Implementing lean strategies is all the rage, but has your CEO really seen the lean light? Use these 10 signs as a gauge to find out.

10. He initiated a brand new lean department.

His thinking: Lean is something new. We don’t want to taint it with our quality or production departments. Quality has nothing to do with lean, and quality’s been around for such a long time that it’s kind of dull. Besides, the quality department has that ISO standard; they get to keep it going because our customers think we need to have it and demand that we do. Lean has kaizen. That’s not even part of the ISO thing. The production department doesn’t have time for lean. They have to focus on expediting orders and getting them out the door—especially that last week, every month. Lean and kaizen would interrupt this flow. I think I’ll set up the lean department’s office right next to the Six Sigma department; that’s dying out anyway.

9. She thinks one-piece flow only applies to production.

Her thinking: I get one-piece flow for manufacturing stuff or creating a service, but the thought of applying that concept to management or leadership is silly. So silly, in fact, I’ve never even thought of it. What would I do then… monitor the process every day instead of at the monthly meeting? That’s not gonna happen. Would I provide feedback and be open to my staff every day, like one-piece flow, instead of how I currently batch all of my performance reviews, once a year, at the end of the year? Fat chance. Would I conduct management review meetings more than twice a year? Yeah, right.

8. He thinks that monthly kaizen events are the key to lean.

His thinking: That’s enough sacrifice. One big ol’ kaizen event, with five or eight employees, once a month… we’ll pick a different area each month. It makes sense. We’ll batch-process our improvement efforts to get rid of batch processing. It makes sense to me.

Read entire article | More Lean CEO articles

Featured Book

Healthcare Kaizen

By Mark Graban and Joseph Swartz

Healthcare Kaizen focuses on the principles methods of daily continuous improvement, or “Kaizen,” for healthcare professionals and organizations.

Healthcare Kaizen shares some of the methods used by numerous hospitals, including Franciscan St. Francis Healthcare, where co-author Joe Swartz has led these efforts. Most importantly, the book covers the management mindsets and philosophies required to make Kaizen work effectively in a hospital department or as a organization-wide program.

All of the examples in the book are real examples that were shared by leading healthcare organizations, with many full-color pictures and visual illustrations of Kaizen-based improvements that were initiated by Chief Operating Officers, nurses, housekeepers, and other staff members at all levels.

More information | More books

Featured Video

Gemba Academy has just released an twelve video module video training course on Kanban.

This course is part of Gemba Academy's Complete Lean Package, which now has over 250 video modules and is used by over 1,000 companies worldwide. More information.

Key Upcoming Events

Upcoming events that must be on your calendar:

	Lean Accounting Summit Orlando, Florida 12-14 September 2012 The Lean Accounting Summit has featured the biggest names in lean and lean accounting. Womack, Rother, Hoseus, Koegninsaker, Bodek, Byrne, Cunningham, Maskell, Fiume, Solomon. These are many of the pioneers of lean thinking.
	AME Annual Conference Chicago, Illinois 15-19 October 2012 The Association for Manufacturing Excellence hosts the world's largest lean conference, for practitioners by practitioners. Workshops, serminars, and tours of factories and other lean facilities.

Lean CEO maintains a comprehensive list of hundreds of upcoming events and workshops.

Full Lean CEO Events Calendar

Evolving Excellence Blog

Join over 10,000 readers who get their daily dose of blunt manufacturing and business reality by subscribing to the Evolving Excellence blog!

or Subscribe to Evolving Excellence by Email

Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:

• The Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah Gang - And traditional accountants go merrily along, oblivious to the disaster they're creating.
• A Lot of Miscellany - A news roundup from the lean world.
• A Fire Truck When an Ambulance Would Suffice - Waste? Try looking at organizational scope creep.
• Ford Gets It, Do You? - How rapid changeover differentiates.
• Eat Mor Chikin - Principles matter - on all sides.
• Ideas are Just Ideas - Lessons from Nokia and Apple.
• Dr. Deming I Know Your Pain - It's not just the Chinese that are competing with North American companies.
• Sorry IndustryWeek, Apple is Not a "Manufacturer" - Apple tops IW's Best Manufacturing Companies list - but they aren't a manufacturer and they aren't best.
• Take Another Path - Sometimes you have to change direction to succeed.
• Sustaining, Leadership, and Why - Sustaining an improvement program requires a solid understanding of "why?"
• Apple's Average Traditional Supply Chain - Apple executes a traditional supply chain fairly well. Period.

Forum Discussions

The 10,000 members of the Lean CEO LinkedIn Group are discussing a variety of topics including:

• Strategic planning and tactical execution.
• Dumping China for America.
• The best is the enemy of the good.
• Manufacturing Moneyball.
• Do you think it matters what workers are called?
• Why do companies find change so difficult?

Lean News

Lean-oriented news stories from the past month.

• GE's Efficiency Strategies (Business First)
• Lean in Pharma (PharmPro)
• Wood Waste into Profit (Woodworking)
• Kaizen for the Data Center (Venture Beat)
• Corporate Marketing Kaizen (Star Phoenix)
• Continually Improving Grammar (Business Lexington)
• How Toyota Uses Kaizen (Business Today)
• Making the Future (The Economist)
• Turn Lean to See Waste (Times of Malta)
• How to Get Hospitals to Think Lean (Hospital Review)