The former Procter & Gamble CEO recently confirmed to head the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs must go beyond government reforms that Congress recently struck and addresses how the troubled agency measures performance and responds to those measures. Critical is seeking out bad news so problems can be solved rather than measuring and rewarding against “good news” so problems are obscured.
—Excerpt from an article on Fortune.com
In order make good on her promise to Congress, Barra must prevent the kinds of engineering failures that caused the ignition problems in the first place and the organizational failures that propelled the problem to its current tragic magnitude. And that will mean changing the culture at GM. To do this, she has to convert discussions from attempts to “prove up right” to solicitations to find out “how might I be wrong."
—Excerpt from USA Today column
In this blog post Steve considers the origins and possible solutions to the problem of huge delays in care delivery at the Veteran’s Administration Health Service.
Read this blog post where Steven Spear suggests reconsidering the focus on response time in favor of a focus on the little things that could prevent a disaster in the first place.
This is an interesting piece by Paul Levy, published on his "Not Running a Hospital" blog about the internal impact of transparent reporting.
Steven J. Spear talks with Bloomberg's Matt Miller and Lori Rothman about Toyota Motor Corp.'s corporate culture and its handling of a recall of more than 8 million vehicles worldwide for unintended acceleration.
Steven J. Spear is interviewed by talks with Bloomberg's Pimm Fox about the outlook for Toyota Motor Corp. following the recall of millions of vehicles because they may suddenly accelerate, causing drivers to lose control.
Conversations on Health Care® is a radio show about the opportunities for reform and innovation in the health care system. In addition to health care headlines, the centerpiece of each show is a feature story and conversation with an innovator in the delivery of care from around the globe.
Organizations display either zombie or agile hero qualities. In zombie organizations, engineers, doctors, nurses, mechanics or managers encounter problems like missing information, missing documentation, unclear assignments, missing materials or even missing colleagues. Yet, not really seeing them as abnormalities, they don't solve them, unrelenting when something is amiss, not pausing to investigate and develop solutions. In contrast, high-velocity learning organizations vanquish foes with fewer people and fewer resources. They don't start with perfect products, services or processes. But, they start by recognizing that imperfection is inevitable, so they constantly look for and find stumbles in execution that impede progress. They aggressively investigate and diagnose those low-level problems and then develop robust "treatments" to prevent recurrence.
An op-ed entitled "A New Design For Healthcare Delivery" was published in the Boston Globe (behind paywall).
An Op-Ed entitled "The Health Factory" was published by the New York Times.