I am grateful to Lean expert Mark Graban for his recent review of Goal Play!  Some excerpts:

Paul weaves together management lessons from his previous industries, including government and healthcare, with lessons from coaching youth soccer.Books like this run the risk of being corny in making analogies between sports and something in work life, but the girls’ soccer analogies are used smartly to tee up the points of each chapter — I’ve really enjoyed reading his book.

There are, of course, great parallels to leadership and improvement in healthcare.

Is it just inevitable that a certain number of patients are going to get hospital-acquired infections? Or fall? Or have the wrong side operated on? Do we need to just get better about cleaning up the problems (or apologizing for them, as some Massachusetts hospitals are doing)? While apologizing for an error might be the downright decent thing to do (better than lying or stonewalling), shouldn’t we do more to PREVENT healthcare harm?

Leaders like Paul Levy (and Paul O’Neill, listen to my podcast with him) challenge organizations to work toward perfection as the goal. We can’t settle for “the way it’s always” been.