It’s a shame that healthcare, generally, hasn’t learned the lessons from ERP… there are some in healthcare who get it and screamed “Fix the workflows before you add technology,” but they were mostly ignored.

http://www.tbo.com/business/business/2007/dec/07/bz-gms-roger-smith-was-a-financial-genius-with-fau-ar-182484/

“To satisfy his curiosity about competition from Japan, Smith agreed in 1984 to a joint manufacturing venture with Toyota Motor Corp. at a mothballed GM plant in Fremont, Calif. But the key lessons about Toyota quality that his executives learned weren’t what he wanted to hear. “He thought Toyota possessed some kind of magic,” said Maryann Keller, a former auto industry analyst and author of “Rude Awakening,” a book about the automaker published in 1990. “The Toyota joint venture taught that GM management was the problem.” The trick to cost savings wasn’t simply getting rid of people. GM had to motivate workers in factories and yes-men in executive suites to take more responsibility and improve output. GM quality and productivity were second-rate. I tried and failed to find out whether Smith ever read “The Machine that Changed the World,” a book written in 1990 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers”

I recently heard a story from somebody who was in a meeting where W. Edwards Deming came to GM and presented to Roger Smith. Deming basically got kicked out and banned for saying the problem was senior leadership.

Words like “traditional” are used to tarnish on any established methodology, even if successful. That way there is room for the “new and improved!” we’re all programmed to be looking for. Plus, if you embrace the continuous improvement aspect of Lean, then it’s constantly new anyway!

Makes me think of Dr. Deming and the need for “constancy of purpose.” We keep practicing Lean, rather than being done implementing it.

Does “traditional Lean” mean “Lean without Six Sigma” to some of those presenters?