WLEI - Lean Enterprise Institute's Podcast

Personal and Organizational Transformation: A Conversation with Dr. Sarah Womack

Josh Howell, LEI president, talks with Dr. Sarah Womack, an eight-year veteran of Toyota and author of Toyota’s Improvement Thinking from the Inside. Sarah discusses how her transformation and that of other individuals within Toyota collectively contributed to organizational improvements and high performance. Her Toyota experiences exponentially advanced her learning and today enable her to successfully impart lean values and mindsets to organizations that are very unlike Toyota. Learn more about lean thinking and practice at lean.org

What it Takes to Win at New Product Development: A Conversation with Steve Spear

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Steve Spear, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, senior fellow at the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, and associated faculty member at Adriane Labs of the Harvard School of Public Health. Spear is also author of The High-Velocity Edge and Wiring the Winning Organization and principal of SeeToSolve.

The conversation explores: 

• Stellar examples of product development innovation (and the learning cultures that made these achievements possible)
• What Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, DevOps, and more schools of systems thinking and management all have in common
• What business and product leaders across hardware and software can learn from each other
• Key ideas and core principles you should take away from his latest book 
• What kind of leadership Steve believes is needed now and what good leadership looks like in practice, given all of the organizational challenges companies face today

Engineering for the Future: A Conversation with MIT D-Lab Founder Amy Smith

In this episode of WLEI Podcast, we welcome Amy Smith, Founding Director of MIT’s D-Lab, an innovative university-based program in international development and a senior lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Socially Responsible Design Meets Lean Product and Process Development: A Conversation with Cynthia E. Smith

In this episode of WLEI Podcast, we welcome Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and author of Design for the Other 90%. Cynthia speaks about design as a catalyst for change and what it means, as she says, to be in “the collective work of building capacity and agency in communities across the world.”

30-Plus Years with Hoshin Kanri

This week The Management Brief presents a podcast with Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer, Strategy. They discuss Mark’s 30-plus years working with hoshin kanri — two decades at Toyota and then coaching executives while with LEI — and the impact that the strategic planning and execution process has had on Toyota and the many companies with which Mark has supported.

You’ll hear how hoshin kanri helped Toyota establish self-reliant North American operations, which required commitment from top leaders outside of Japan establishing a vision and engaging and developing management amid a period of rapid growth. Mark also describes how companies beyond Toyota —  even those without historically strong management and a culture of problem-solving and collaboration — have been able to establish these corporate traits while they’re defining strategic objectives and taking actions to achieve them.

To learn more about hoshin kanri and how to deploy the process in your company, be sure to also read Mark’s upcoming book, Managing on Purpose.

Isao Yoshino Reflects on 40 Years at Toyota

In this edition of The Management Brief, Mark Reich sits down with Isao Yoshino, a 40-year veteran of Toyota and a driving force behind the company’s success with hoshin kanri. Yoshino shares the impact that hoshin kanri and A3 problem-solving has had on him professionally and personally.

 

Key takeaways include:

· Multiple roles over four decades at Toyota shaped Yoshino’s management beliefs and career.

· Yoshino discusses working directly with Mikio Sugiura, who was instrumental in developing Toyota’s hoshin kanri process.

· Hoshin kanri can positively impact a company as it has Toyota, notes Yoshino, but it’s not without a few challenges.

· Delivering bad news first and an earnest desire to learn from failures were commonplace for Yoshino and Toyota executives and fostered the improvement mindset that still thrives in the company today.

Driving Continuous Improvement through Frontline Supervisors: A Conversation with TRQSS President Mark Dolsen

In this episode of the WLEI podcast, we sit down with Mark Dolsen, President of TRQSS, a seat belt manufacturer that supplies Toyota and other automakers in North America. Mark shares insights into TRQSS's lean journey and the critical role of frontline supervisors in driving continuous improvement. 

Key takeaways include: 

• TRQSS has evolved its lean practices over decades, starting with the influence of Japanese coordinators and later adopting TWI principles. 

• The company's "TPS for Team Leaders" program focuses on developing supervisors' capabilities in areas like flow, standardized work, and kaizen. 

• TRQSS's quality management approach is rooted in the principle of "mizenboushi" — proactively maintaining process conditions to ensure good parts every time. Read more about how TRQSS applies mizenboushi in this paper.

• Mark's leadership philosophy emphasizes coaching, teaching, and empowering employees to make decisions and contribute to the company's lean culture. 

Building a Resilient Business with Hoshin Kanri and Problem Solving : A Conversation with Grand Rapids Chair CEO Geoff Miller

In this edition of The Management Brief, Mark Reich sits down with Geoff Miller, CEO of Grand Rapids Chair, to discuss his company's lean transformation journey. Geoff shares how the adoption of hoshin kanri and A3 problem-solving has helped the company maintain strategic focus and build organizational capability. Geoff offers a candid reflection on his leadership transformation, underscoring the importance of perseverance and continuous learning, even in the face of significant disruption. 

Key takeaways include:

• Hoshin Kanri enabled Grand Rapids Chair to build stability in critical daily management measures like safety, quality, and reliability.
• The catchball process for cascading strategic goals fostered alignment and buy-in across the management team.
• A3 problem-solving empowered employees across departments to tackle large, complex challenges and drive meaningful change.
• Sustaining a lean transformation requires personal commitment from leadership to model the problem-solving mindset and tools.
• Developing human capability in problem-solving is essential for realizing the full benefits of lean.

Achieving Unprecedented Safety at Turner Construction: a Conversation with Charlie Murphy

In this edition of The Management Brief, LEI President Josh Howell sat down with Charlie Murphy, Senior Vice President at Turner Construction, to discuss the company's remarkable lean transformation journey. Charlie shares how the organization leveraged core lean principles and practices to drive a dramatic improvement in safety performance and build a culture of continuous improvement.

Key takeaways include: 

• Turner's safety performance improvement, from a recordable incident rate of 5 per 200,000-man hours down to under 1, driven by fact-based problem-solving and a rigorous management system.
• Building problem-solving capability and implementing hoshin kanri connected high-level priorities to daily problem-solving and operational improvements.
• The shift from "relentless" to "co-learning" safety incident reviews fostered a more collaborative, fact-based approach to addressing safety issues.
• Standardizing daily management systems and empowering middle managers were critical steps in scaling lean practices across Turner's 1,500 active projects.

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Driving Healthcare Innovation: a Conversation with Jay Hill

In the latest edition of the Design Brief, we sit down with Jay Hill, the Vice President of Advanced Technology at GE Healthcare, to discuss the company's approach to product development in the complex healthcare technology space.  

Jay offers insights into:  

• GE Healthcare's deep engagement with clinicians at all stages of product development, from needs identification to prototype evaluation.  

• The "lead program integrator" role and its importance in managing the integration of complex, multi-disciplinary healthcare systems.  

• GE Healthcare's structured approach to monitoring technology trends and matching them with clinical problems to inform their product roadmap.  

• Exciting applications of AI in healthcare, from automating workflows to supporting clinicians in making better diagnostic and treatment decisions.  

• Advice for medical students and early-career clinicians on embracing the evolving relationship between their practice and advancing technologies.