Guest post from Mark Graban
There’s an interesting quote from Taiichi Ohno in “Taiichi Ohno’s Workplace Management,” which I was re-reading today…
“You are a fool if you do what I say. You are a greater fool if you don’t do as I say. You should think for yourself and come up with better ideas than mine.”
The best examples of Lean in healthcare are examples where leaders and organizations learned, but did not blindly copy. Sami Bahri DDS (the “lean dentist”) read Deming, Shingo, Ohno, etc. and had to figure this out himself, rather than copying some other dentist.
ThedaCare is the first to say “don’t directly copy what we do.”
We can learn from others, run our own experiments to see what works, and keep improving to make it better than even Ohno or Shingo would have imagined.
Related: Two resources, largely untapped in American organizations, are potential information and employee creativity – Respect People by Creating a Climate for Joy in Work