I fell in love with Lean Six Sigma almost 30 years ago…but it takes some work to stay in love with Lean Six Sigma.
Are you willing to do what it takes to make Lean Six Sigma your Valentine?
Continue Reading "Have You Fallen In Love With Lean Six Sigma?"
I have been thinking for some time that someone would come along, start buying up hospitals and forcing them to adopt the Lean principles of Amazon and Six Sigma to achieve the “science and evidence” that Don Berwick has been challenging the IHI to adopt.
Warren Buffet has the money, but usually invests in “well-run” companies, not ones in trouble. An estimated half of all hospitals are in financial trouble (often because of the lack of Lean Six Sigma).
Bezos and Amazon have the operational efficiency needed in virtually all healthcare environments.
Dimon has a big bank.
They are all worried about the quality of healthcare and the rising costs.
Continue Reading "Hospital Costs a “Hungry Tapeworm on U.S. Economy” says Warren Buffett"
I started using TurboTax to do my taxes years ago. I used to gather up my 1099s and W-2 and everything else and spend a whole day doing my taxes. Your taxes may not be as complicated as mine, but think of these forms as “work in process” (WIP). I was doing them in a big batch just before the filing deadline.
Then I started using a Lean approach. Whenever a W-9 or 1099 arrives in the mailbox, I input it into the software. By mid-March when the business taxes are finished, everything is in and my taxes are ready to file.
I believe we are teaching people things they don’t need to know to solve problems they don’t have to impress people they don’t like.
You don’t have to know everything about statistics to do Six Sigma projects. What you need to know adheres to the 4/50 Rule: 4% of the knowledge will deliver over 50% of the results.
And if you automate the formulas and decision trees using QI Macros, you can collapse the learning curve in such a way that “No Belts” can go from zero to hero in a matter of hours. Here’s how:
Remember how you learned things when you were a kid? That’s not how anyone teaches Lean Six Sigma, but it could be.
Continue Reading "Show-Do-Know – The Secret to Accelerated Learning"
One of our QI Macros users sent me a Greenbelt Project to review. The team did a great job of using the tools and connecting the dots. There was only one small problem…
Most of the improvement posters at this year’s Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) conference are still using line, bar and pie charts, not the tools of quality improvement. There were several posters using QI Macros control charts, Pareto charts and fishbones this year from Sutter Health and Howard University Hospital.
People have been trying to make statistics simple and easy to understand for decades.
But statistics aren’t simple. Maybe we should change how we teach them?
Everyone seems to think that top down, leadership-driven is the only way to implement Lean Six Sigma. It’s not.
50 years of research proves that it fails half the time. Yep, 50% failure rate. That’s less than 1 sigma.
This type of failure is so common that it even has a name: The Stalinist Paradox.
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