From the website leanROI.org, here is an interview with John Toussaint, M.D., CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value.

Main Page: http://www.leanroi.org/contributors/johntoussaintmd

From the beginning of the interview:

"I think ROI is frankly not the right way to look at this. As the CEO I was interested in total organizational performance.
And so what I measured was what’s our operating income year over year, is it
improving or not? Are expenses improving year over year? Is our
productivity improving year over year? Is our quality improving year
over year?"

Part 1: http://www.leanroi.org/archives/180

Part 2: http://www.leanroi.org/archives/190

Part 3: http://www.leanroi.org/archives/243

Part 4: http://www.leanroi.org/archives/258

Part 5: http://www.leanroi.org/archives/268

Commenting on Toyota's recall crisis, Jim Womack, founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, tells Bloomberg TV that the carmaker needs to "walk the talk" about how it runs the business and do a better job of engaging with te public.

NUMMI will close in spring 2010, but the GM-Toyota joint venture will continue to offer lessons about how to change a company’s culture, dramatically, quickly, permanently. In this article for MIT’s Sloan Management Review, John Shook, who as a new hire at Toyota in 1983 helped develop training to introduce the Toyota system to American employees at NUMMI, explains what worked. The plant went from having the worst quality in GM to having the best within a year. Absenteeism fell quickly from 20% to 2%. Among the lessons, according to Shook, who now is a senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute, is to start a  transformation by changing what people do rather than how they think. (Used with permission. Please note that graphics copyrighted by illustrators do not appear in the PDF. The story also is available with registration at the Sloan web sitse: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2010/winter/51211/how-to-change-a-culture-lessons-from-nummi/)

Analysts from IDC and AMR offer insights to Supply Chain Management Review about how Toyota dropped the ball in resolving the problem with sticky accelerators.

John Shook, LEI author, faculty member, and senior advisor, in an interview with Bloomberg News about Toyota's recall of vehicles with sticking accelerators notes that the company is examining the problem and itself to determine if there is a "deeper crisis" that needs attention.

Balance the technical aspects of a kaizen event with the human elements. An article in Defense Industry Daily suggests11 questions that managers should ask themselves before the event to get the balance right.

Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell announced that more state agencies will apply lean principles to reduce the size and cost of state government. The effort will expand from the state Departments of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Labor (DOL) to Motor Vehicles (DMV), Consumer Protection (DCP), Administrative Services (DAS), Revenue Services (DRS), and Economic and Community Development (DECD).

An article in The Wall Seet Journal argues that Toyota's problem with sticky gas pedals demonstrates that the lean concepts of using common parts and designs across multiple product lines and reducing the number of suppliers to reduce costs compounded the problem.