With 30 years of driving Lean transformations under his belt—both in-house at Danaher and as the founder of Lean Horizons—Mark C. DeLuzio has a vantage point across a variety of industries. He often hears the challenges Lean leaders face now that they’ve been implementing Lean for a decade or more. They are concerned that they aren’t getting the results they used to, and they don’t know why. Most leaders believe their problems are unique to their company, but Mark sees more commonalities than differences. Flatlined: Why Lean Transformations Fail and What to Do About It draws on the author’s experience as the original pioneer of the most successful Lean business system next to Toyota, as well as his progress over the past 18 years in helping companies replicate what Danaher achieved. Mark DeLuzio knows you need an actionable approach to make rapid shifts, not theory. With this book, Mark DeLuzio gives you: • the reasons why companies are now flatlining with Lean; • five steps to solving this problem, no matter what your industry or corporate culture; • real talk on why your organization is probably mediocre (even if it’s making a lot of money) and how to disrupt it to make it genuinely world class; • the questions you should always be asking at every stage and level of your Lean initiative.

Flatlined lifts the veil of secrecy on twenty-first century health care and delves into the realities of good people caught in a bad medical system. Dr. Guy L. Clifton, a practitioner as well as a policy advocate, reveals first-hand accounts of needless tragedy, such as the young man who died after a car wreck for lack of a bed in a qualified hospital and the surgeon who was dejected by the scarcity of resources needed to enable him to perform heart surgery on an uninsured man. Arguing that a lack of coordinated care and quality medical practice benchmarks result in high levels of redundancy and ineffectiveness, Clifton proposes that the key to reducing health care costs, improving quality, and financially protecting the uninsured, is to reduce wastefulness, and offers a solution for achieving success. Flatlined sounds the warning call: By 2018 Medicare and Medicaid will consume about one-third of the federal budget. American businesses now pay three times as much of their payroll for health care as global competitors, expected to worsen as health care grows at twice the rate of the U.S. economy. Based on his years of experience in policy and medicine, Clifton offers an attainable solution through the development of an American Medical Quality System.

Addresses the causes and consequences of the breakdown in American health care and proposes a National Medical Quality System that would be dedicated to reducing waste and improving the quality of medicine.

What happens to black health care professionals in the new economy, where work is insecure and organizational resources are scarce? In Flatlining, Adia Harvey Wingfield exposes how hospitals, clinics, and other institutions participate in “racial outsourcing,” relying heavily on black doctors, nurses, technicians, and physician assistants to do “equity work”—extra labor that makes organizations and their services more accessible to communities of color. Wingfield argues that as these organizations become more profit driven, they come to depend on black health care professionals to perform equity work to serve increasingly diverse constituencies. Yet black workers often do this labor without recognition, compensation, or support. Operating at the intersection of work, race, gender, and class, Wingfield makes plain the challenges that black employees must overcome and reveals the complicated issues of inequality in today’s workplaces and communities.

Presents the stories of seven survivors of Hurricane Katrina who tried to evacuate, protect their possessions, and save loved ones before, during, and after the flood.

How deep are you willing to go to unlock the mystery? ------------------------ A young hotshot journalist's life unravels in a web of mystery and horror when he is called back to a home and family he hasn't seen in over a decade. He returns home after the mysterious death of his grandfather, a WWII vet who has seen, first hand, the horrors of life and man. From the beaches of Normandy to the bitter cold of Bastogne; he was a respected hero and man of great strength both physically and mentally. A man who was confined to an asylum in the last weeks of his life; where he spoke of demonic entities, faceless spirits who tormented him relentlessly, and images depicting a black shadowed poltergeist in a top hat and grin. A "sniveling whelp," as he would once say, confined to an asylum where he carved and drew strange markings upon the floor, the ceiling, the walls; stories and tales told all leading to a nameless vessel. A ghost ship that has drank the most ancient of blood. Tasted the most ancient of flesh. A vessel that has now...awoken. Now hunted by the shadowed entity of his grandfather's past and its dark brethren of phantom wraiths, macabre menace, and demonic beasts, Randy Conroy must survive the nightmare his grandfather could not. "A first class ghost story....intensely visual!" Mister Lobo, (nationally syndicated horror host) "Matthew Ewald's love of horror is matched only by his love of mystery--the tale unfolds like a descriptive Film Noir in which the mysteries grab us long before we realize we are actually down a terrifying path into the horror genre..." -- Michele Specht (Corporal Simone Cole -- Clive Barker's "Jericho") "Take yourself into the hollowed bowels of the Queen Mary...then drown in Ewald's brutal and haunting prose." -- Wayne Allen Sallee (Five time Bram Stoker Award Nominee and author of "The Holy Terror," "With Wounds Still Wet," "Fiends By Torchlight," and the upcoming "Proactive Contrition")