WLEI - Lean Enterprise Institute's Podcast

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

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

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.

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.”

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.