SuccessfulWorkplace

The following was first published on The TIBCO Blog. As shown in Healthcare Reform That Can’t Be Stopped, the Toyota Production System has found a home in healthcare. The Wisconsin-based TPS pioneer, ThedaCare, has been employing Toyota’s industrial efficiency principles in its hospitals to great effect for more than 10 years. Thedacare is now seeing great […]

The following was first published on the Harvard Business Review. It’s difficult to get senior executives who have been successful managing a particular way to realize that they need to change their approach. Yet this is exactly the challenge facing leaders of the finance function who are asked to help their organization improve the way […]

Facebook goes far beyond a social networking site. It has become the single best identity management service on the planet. Want to leave a comment on TechCrunch? You need to sign in with Facebook, not through LinkedIn or any professional presence. That may seem counterintuitive but the new Web works not on how we market […]

The following first appeared on the Harvard Business Review. Toyota is famous for its Toyota Production System, an approach that effectively engages front-line workers in improving their work. As I argued in a recent post, “pulling” improvement from the front line is critical to continually improve operations, and Toyota does it very well. Companies that “push” […]

This is an outstanding TED talk by Dr. Atul Gawande, physician and author of The Checklist Manifesto on how to heal medicine. “The most expensive care is not necessarily the best care, and vice versa, the best care often turns out to be the least expensive; it has fewer complications and people get more efficient […]

The following is an expansion of what was first published on Harvard Business Review. There are few more personal, passionate, and political topics than health care. The reasons for this are clear: Health care spending has reached 17% of the U.S. GDP, outcomes are worse than in other developed countries, and an attempt to fix […]

Healthcare is THE topic of 2012 across the country as it few things touch people so viscerally. It is very hard to have a discussion, in fact, without battle lines being drawn around politics, personal or professional perspective. There is general agreement that something has to change but little agreement on what and how. Going […]

The following was first published on the Harvard Business Review. In a recent post, I argued that companies can’t keep their costs in line by attacking them directly. The typical approaches of budget cuts and layoffs usually don’t result in sustained changes to their cost structure — the costs creep back. Instead, companies must make […]

Enormous attention has been paid to the Supreme Court review of Healthcare Reform, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). You’d think the entire reform effort hinges on the decision of a court divided along ideological lines. Welcome to politics and news reporting. There is a background detail that rarely gets mentioned. Perhaps it isn’t […]

First published in the Harvard Business Review. As much as companies like to tell you the customer is king, that’s hardly true in most industries. Instead, major players put enormous effort into narrowing our choices — selling us on what they have to offer. These efforts are obvious in the bricks and mortar world, where retailers control […]