Purpose & Principles Podcast

S. Max Brown

Excellence in life and leadership.

  1. 02/22/2022

    Purpose & Principles I S2 E48: Dr Matt Pollard & Scott Saxton -- Continuous Improvement in Patient Care

    Listen in with Dr. Matt Pollard and Scott Saxton, two of the leaders of continuous improvement at Intermountain Healthcare. This journey has brought incredible and meaningful results along the way. Hear the stories and be inspired! Dr. Pollard is the Vice President of Continuous Improvement at Intermountain Healthcare. His passion is engaging leaders, physicians and caregiver teams in improving healthcare and patient outcomes through Continuous Improvement. He has trained many healthcare providers in the use of Continuous Improvement and has presented at multiple national conferences and healthcare organizations across the country. Scott has been involved with Lean and Continuous Improvement efforts for 27 years. He left manufacturing (after 23 years at Autoliv) and 9 years ago he began applying Lean in Healthcare by accepting a position as Northern Region Continuous Improvement Director for Intermountain Healthcare.  This started as a Pilot only in the North region.  With the success of implementing Lean in the North, top leadership at Intermountain Healthcare chose to adopt the Continuous Improvement Model (Lean) at a system level.   Since then Scott has been asked to work at a system level, responsible for supporting Intermountain Senior leaders over hospitals, clinical services and Clinics as the Assistant Vice President of Continuous Improvement.  Intermountain has seen over 250K thousand implemented ideas from their employees, millions of dollars in cost savings and significant improvement in Quality metrics.  The adoption and practice of the Intermountain Operating Model is credited from Intermountain’s Senior Leadership as the reason for improved results as they own and drive accountability.

    53 min
  2. 10/21/2021

    Purpose & Principles I S2 43: Kris Cox - Stop Decorating the Fish

    Kristen Cox is the world's leading authority on how to apply the Theory of Constraints to governments and non profits.  She is perhaps best known for her work as the former Executive Director of the Governor's Office of Management and Budget (GOMB) for the State of Utah where she orchestrated a 35 percent improvement across Utah's $20B executive branch. It was 2008, and I was in serious trouble... I was leading a state agency in Salt Lake City during the economic crisis. The worse the economy got, the more citizens came to us looking for help.  And the economy was getting worse by the day. Caseloads were up by 60 percent. Common sense would say I needed to hire 60 percent more employees and lease the office space to house them. But that was out of the question. We all knew what was coming: budget cuts. My team was stressed out, overworked, and worried. Truth-be-told, so was I. I started trying different approaches--knowing there had to be a better way.  Most failed.  One showed promise, but it clearly wasn't going to work out of the shrink wrap--it was built for business and industry.  It would need to be modified to work in government. So, that's what my team and I did.  We tweaked, experimented, failed, learned, and then...we figured it out.   We were not only able to meet the unprecedented demand, but improve quality, and we returned $30 million back to the General Fund--we didn't need it. Morale was restored. We were a team again knowing we just pulled off a huge accomplishment against all odds.   Soon after, the Governor made me executive director over an agency that would oversee the state's $20 billion budget and all of the executive branch's operations. Together, we set an ambitious target to improve all of state government by 25 percent.   We improved by 35 percent. I started sharing our story online.   We organized the biggest conference of its kind in the world, and I co-authored two books.  I've now applied this in over 200 systems in a huge variety of settings.   It works.

    42 min
5
out of 5
22 Ratings

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Excellence in life and leadership.