Archive for October, 2011

MidState Medical Center: A Great Place to Be Sick is a Place That Practices Lean

October 13, 2011
Midstate Medical Center

Midstate Medical Center

Here’s the hospital I want to go to when I become sick: MidState Medical Center in Meriden, Connecticut.  It is hard to find documented information on this hospital, but it appears that their CEO, Lucille Janatka, practices some form of Lean, possibly the Baldrige Model, according to what I’ve heard in the local community.

In articles, Janatka describes herself as a “Servant Leader.”  The story I’ve heard goes like this.  When she took over the hospital in 1999 as CEO, she organized grassroots meetings of every single worker, right down to the janitor.  (Heh, “down.”)  They recommended changes using this “Reflective Improvement Methodology,” whatever you like to call it.  Janatka lead them in implementing many of the changes proposed.
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@lukew raw notes from #nycupa meeting @euroscgny with live updates

October 12, 2011

This talk blew me away, actually. Finally I get Maria Mandel, whom I worked with at Ogilvy before she went to AT&T. She started a focus on mobile years ago. This talk opened my eyes, not about mobile, but another level of thinking on Network and device. I had already intuited the importance of mobile since my Tibetan monastic friends used mobile in rural India in a very sophisticated way when I was there in 2007. And they were already at an advanced then. I already understood mobile utility has a lot to do with context of user. What I had not stopped to think about I learned tonight: the Idea to design mobile first. (more…)

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The Appearance of the “Last Responsible Moment”

October 9, 2011
Frederick W. Taylor

Frederick W. Taylor

Returning to the idea of “buttoned up.” Because of a series of seeming unrelated coincidences, I’ve become interested in the idea of the “Last Responsible Moment” (“LRM”), a decision-making process that is sure to not feel “buttoned up.”

I happened to see Karl Scotland retreating a tweet by Alistair Cockburn that Alistair had blogged about LRM and then, coincidentally, at least according to site stats, I had just noticed a series of searches on “Model T Ford” have brought people to my own blog. They were probably looking just looking for photos of the car more than to think about – and question – Frederic Taylor’s School of Scientific Management (a methodology that was Fountainhead of the Waterfall process).

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