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Mark Graban: Every Employee Is An Innovator By Mark Graban, Author of the 'Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction,' winner of the Shingo Prize in 2009. Creator of leanblog.org, and Senior Fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute. On twitter as @leanblog. - Last updated: Tuesday, May 11, 2010

"Innovation" is a trendy business buzzword - it's much more appealing, generally speaking, to executives than the term "lean" is. Innovation is sexy and fun. Lean sounds dull and monotonous. Improve continuously -- who has the patience for that? Not those who would rather swing for the fences and find that one silver-bullet home run innovation that will ensure future profits. Lean organizations, while not ignoring large innovations (think Toyota Prius), also focus on daily innovation through Lean and process improvement methods, like kaizen. It's often thought, mistakenly, that Lean and innovation can't go together. Those who think Lean created rigid, ...

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Mark Graban: Same Misunderstanding Occurs in Hospitals By Mark Graban, Author of the 'Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction,' winner of the Shingo Prize in 2009. Creator of leanblog.org, and Senior Fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute. On twitter as @leanblog. - Last updated: Thursday, April 29, 2010

There's a fallacy in the question as stated - that "lean" means there's a major risk of not having what you need to get your work done. This is one way the word "lean" is sometimes misunderstood (going back to the  1980s book "Zero Inventories," the title of which was taken too literally by some). During my graduate school studies in the 1990s, I worked with a manufacturer who had taken "zero inventories" and what they thought was "lean" to an extreme. They slashed finished goods inventory and very soon after couldn't make shipments to customers! They had a process ...

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