12Oct 2018 by Steve Musica No Comments
When: Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

When: Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

Review
  This post is a summary of the key learnings from the 2018 book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink. The book was an instant bestseller from the well-known author, and draws upon recent research from psychology, biology, neuroscience and economics. It is easy to read with many great examples and stories to demonstrate that Timing is really a science. This post synthesizes the main takeaways from each chapter of the book to save our readers some time!   Figure Out Your Daily When Are you a morning lark, night owl, or third bird? To find out, identify the midpoint of your typical night’s sleep- halfway between going to sleep and waking up. If the midpoint is before 3 AM you are probably a lark.…
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14Sep 2018 by Steve Musica No Comments
Developing High-Performing Organizations

Developing High-Performing Organizations

Lesson
Lean East was founded in 2010 with a mission to bring out the best in organizations by bringing out the best in people. We focus on introducing proven Lean Six Sigma improvement methods to service organizations in Maine and New England – in industries including healthcare, government, insurance, construction, and finance. Many of the clients we have partnered with have had a common goal – to improve their culture and performance and provide better customer service. Some client organizations want to improve their processes and provide more customer value with less waste. Others focus more on changing work culture, training their leaders and staff, and improving teamwork. One client wanted to improve in multiple dimensions and move the company from good to great. A common theme with all our clients is…
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29Jul 2018 by Steve Musica No Comments
Selecting a Lean Project

Selecting a Lean Project

Lesson
  The Lean East team has had several meetings in the past month with organizations new to Lean thinking. The leaders of these organizations want to improve processes and have learned that Lean principles work. But with all the problems and improvement needs in a typical organization, where do you begin?   When leaders ask us for input and support for selecting a Lean project, we share our simple project selection matrix. Here are the eight items we review and rate – each either passes or fails. We recommend prioritizing the projects that pass all, or nearly all, of the following criteria:   Important to the team and organization: Ensure the project you are considering is related to a critical organizational need. A successful project result needs to matter to…
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08Mar 2018 by Steve Musica 94 Comments
The Power of A3 Process Improvement

The Power of A3 Process Improvement

Lesson
The Lean East team helps organizations learn how to use Lean thinking and tools to remove waste from their processes. We prefer to employ a “learn by doing” approach where we train and coach these methods while engaged in organizational improvement projects. If organizations already have an established improvement process we will work within that process and seek to improve it. But if the organization does not have a robust process in place (and most do not) then we recommend using the Lean East A3 Process Improvement tool.   Lean thinking Let’s define a few terms first. Lean refers to a philosophy and management strategy focused on customer value and respect for people. Lean is not about layoffs or running the organization on a shoestring. Lean is continually improving the…
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05Oct 2017 by Steve Musica No Comments
Immunity to Change

Immunity to Change

Review
Immunity to Change: How to Overcome it and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization is a 2009 book written by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. It has updated examples of their experience using their immunity to change concepts first introduced in their 2001 book, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. This book was recently recommended by another experienced improvement consultant. Since I was unfamiliar with the book and change process, I decided to learn the process and share key points with my friends and colleagues. I typically work with teams and organizations, not individuals, and have not used the immunity to change process myself. It does provide a path to understanding root cause, so I see reasons why it could work well…
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05Sep 2017 by Steve Musica No Comments
Accelerating Change

Accelerating Change

Lesson
  Organizational improvement is becoming more and more important every year as the pace of change in technology, consumers, and competitors is accelerating. Twenty years ago, companies didn’t have websites since people were still sending email on their dial-up modems. Google search engines didn’t exist. It is just ten years ago that Apple introduced the iPhone. Remember when we rented movies from stores instead of streaming them? It is becoming rare for me to visit a store any more now that I can read product reviews online, order with one click from my phone, and have the item at my door in two days for free. I am learning to adapt, but my children are growing up in a world where they expect instant gratification: any item or information they…
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12Aug 2017 by Steve Musica No Comments
Leaders Eat Last

Leaders Eat Last

Review
In our previous posts, we have discussed the importance of having a clear reason to change and explained that organizational culture and history matters when establishing a sense of urgency. Now we will look at some of the reasons why this is the case, truly “evolutionary” reasons related to our brain. Thanks to the trial-and-error process of evolution taking place over the past two-and-a-half million years, human brains have adapted to survive. In the 2014 book Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, author Simon Sinek explains why a feeling of safety is necessary whether we are a caveman or an assistant in a large corporation. Sinek discusses five chemicals that our body has designed for evolutionary reasons that still impact all of us every day.…
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31Jul 2017 by Steve Musica No Comments
Establishing a Sense of Urgency

Establishing a Sense of Urgency

Lesson
People Don't Hate Change II Establishing a Sense of Urgency This is our second post reviewing why some teams and organizations struggle with change more than others. In our previous post, we share the need to create a burning platform – a clear reason to change. Unfortunately, many leaders struggle with this first important need. Consider these two scenarios: Leader A:         The leader meets with the team and shares recent performance results. The new initiative is not meeting goal, putting the future of the entire team at risk. A 20% cost reduction will need to be made, and each member of the team is asked to help identify and make the changes. Leader B:         The leader meets with the team and offers coaching and facilitation for team members to improve the process…
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04May 2017 by Steve Musica 1 Comment
People Don’t Hate Change

People Don’t Hate Change

Lesson
People Don't Hate Change Improve your change process and people will enjoy change Change occurs all the time; how can you get better at it?   At Lean East, we coach teams on how to improve their processes. Most of the organizations we help have dedicated employees and smart leaders, yet they struggle to make changes. We often hear the excuse from individuals that they don't like to change, yet some teams and a few organizations don't have these same issues. Why do some teams and organizations struggle with change more than others? We have observed several causes for these struggles and grouped them into several themes. In our next several blog posts we will describe several common issues and give examples of each. We will then conclude by showing how…
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16Mar 2017 by Steve Musica No Comments
Simplify the Customer

Simplify the Customer

Lesson
To improve health care delivery in the United States, simplify the customer Lean Six Sigma focuses on maximizing value for the customer by removing waste from processes. The customer is usually easy to identify; they purchase a product or service and expect that product or service to have the features they want, at the time they want it, with perfect quality at the lowest possible price. In a free market system, companies that provide customers the most value at the lowest cost are rewarded. US-based health care is not a free market system, making the customers in health care harder to identify and understand. Our Lean Healthcare East team has identified customers for our (United States based) client organizations as: Client organization Customer Hospital and physician practice The admitted patient…
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