WLEI - Lean Enterprise Institute’s Podcast

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with executive coach and engineering leader Sarah Milstein about how to keep teams focused on value creation by putting people at the center of work design.  My conversation with Sarah explores:  How to create cultures of respect as a leader  How companies can simplify job roles, salaries, and raises to focus employees on high-value work   Sarah’s advice for how engineering and product leaders can successfully navigate this moment in tech, including the trends that will pass and the trends that will stick  How to work with teams of engineers to create the conditions for continuous learning  How to support people well so that teams build strong, sustainable lean product and process development systems   About Sarah Milstein  Sarah Milstein coaches executive and emerging leaders in tech. Previously, she held executive roles at a number of tech startups and in the federal government. She was also CEO and co-founder of Lean Startup Productions. Earlier, she was a freelance journalist writing regularly for The New York Times. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. https://sarahmilstein.com 

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Julia Austin about what the lean product and process development principle “Put People First” looks like in practice.   An executive fellow at Harvard Business School, Julia is an executive coach with experience leading successful product teams in tech at companies like Akamai Technologies, VMware, Inc., and DigitalOcean. She is also author of the book, After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup.   My conversation with Julia explores:  How to create effective collaboration across people and teams to support an excellent product or service  Where leaders and teams struggle in product development in 2025  How leaders can support people to drive high-performance  Standout moments of people working together vastly improve a product and service  How to leverage AI while keeping human beings at the center of work design  Why a culture of care and respect builds teams of responsible experts  

In this week’s edition of The Management Brief, Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, speak with Nelson Repenning, School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Nelson also is the co-author of There’s Got to Be a Better Wayi and the Co-Founder and Chief Social Scientist of ShiftGear Work Design, a consultancy that focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to the successful implementation, execution, and improvement of business processes.  This month The Management Brief is presenting theories that are guiding organizational transformations, including Nelson’s dynamic work design, an “anti-initiative” approach for redesigning work to solve the right problems effectively and, in doing so, increase productivity, profits, and associate engagement.   Dynamic work design helps organizations challenge the mindset that they can forecast and plan — budget, strategy, human resources, capital — with accuracy. Nelson’s alternative: “If we accept that the world is not perfectly predictable, we might go back and design some of our core processes a little bit differently to create an organization that not only plans but also is capable of learning from experience and adapting to the new information they get as they go.”   Dynamic work design is based on five principles:  Solve the right problem: This principle is “a charge to focus on bite-sized pieces of important problems and use structured methods, whether it’s the A3 or DMAIC or whatever your preferred version is to make sure that you actually solve that problem in a fundamental way,” says Nelson.  Structure for discovery: This involves configuring every job in the organization so that the individual doing the job learns the right lessons and can get feedback to adjust behaviors to do work in the right way.  Connect the human chain: “Let’s leverage the collective intelligence of the organization by making sure that problems quickly get to the person who is in the best position to solve them,” instructs Nelson. “So it’s essentially a charge to wire together the information flow so that knowledge about a particular issue gets to the right place and gets there quickly.”  Regulate for flow: This is a version of Toyota pull that involves making sure there is the right amount of work in the system to prevent “traffic jams” of work.  Visualize the work: This principle helps to apply visualization usually found in physical work to knowledge work, which frequently lacks such signals. “If we can create a kind of digital twin or radar screen ...  so that we can see whether knowledge work is moving or not, it often unlocks a lot of that natural problem solving that you would get in other contexts if the work were a little bit more available to us,” explains Nelson.  Nelson described how the Broad Institute, a research organization dedicated to understanding the roots of disease and closing the gap between new biological insights and impact for patients, successfully applied dynamic work design in a knowledge-work environment to improve research grant workflows. The institute had one grant process that was particularly problematic, time-consuming, frustrated staff, and required workarounds.   Sheila Dodge, COO of Broad Clinical Labs, followed the dynamic work design principles in a direct manner and set clear targets: get grants approved in 10 days rather than the 20 or 30 days that it was taking. “They mapped the process pretty carefully so you could see all the steps that they went through. And then ... they created a really simple visual management system to plot how the work was flowing or track how the work was flowing,” says Nelson. Using a white board they depicted steps in the process, with a sticky note representing each grant moving through the process, which quickly revealed their poor design choices. They then reconfigured resources and the work started flowing dramatically.  The trio also discussed Nelson’s work relating to:  The efficacy of face-to-face communications: When designing processes for getting work done, face-to-face communications should in place where most helpful, such as where there is ambiguity or uncertainty that needs to be processed. “We have discovered that often a daily meeting can replace, if it’s well designed, hundreds of emails a day if you design the meeting [to] bring all the uncertainty into the meeting,” says Nelson.  Seagull management: This refers to the uncomplimentary behavior of managers who, when there is a crisis, “fly in like a flock of seagulls and then sort of poop on everything and then fly away.” Nelson says that “as leaders get more senior, they really underestimate the symbolic impact of their actions... The thing that people don’t understand when they get to those corner offices is that everybody is looking at them to try to figure out what behaviors are appropriate in this organization. They are the chief role model, whether they like it or not. And so I think as a consequence, with the best of intentions, leaders often have really pathological impacts on their organization.”   AI will change work dynamics: “There’s no question that AI is going to change our lives in very material ways,” says Nelson. “But I actually think it is going to put an even greater premium on the kinds of things that we collectively do... It’s best captured by one of my former students [who] said, ‘You know, there’s few ways to lose money faster than automating a process you don’t understand.’ I think that’s going to be very true in the machine learning AI-enabled world, and I think it’s going to put a real premium on understanding how the work actually gets done. And then using these new tools in very strategic ways.”

This month The Management Brief will explore prominent lean theories that have been guiding organizations in their lean transformations. This week, Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, are joined by Dr. Steven Spear, renown lean expert and senior lecturer at MIT.   Steven is co-author of Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification,1 which examines how some companies over the last 150 years have led markets by solving their most important problems better, faster, and easier than the competition. The trio discuss Steven’s work and his 30-plus years of lean learnings.  Steven recalls his start at the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), when Mark was one of his mentors and sensei along with the Hajime Obha. He was thrust into all things lean and trying to grasp the Toyota Production System (TPS), without much clear instruction of principles and tools, instead just guidance to go and see and find things that were broken. “What I realized was going on is that they were teaching me to look for broken things, and the reason why they weren’t telling me how is they wanted to first see what was broken in my approach,” says Steven. “So there was this layer of see a problem, solve a problem. That becomes sort of a mantra in my work about how we organize our behavior, how we architect our processes, how we architect our processes so that we can immediately see where we’re wrong and use that as an immediate trigger to swarm onto the situation, figure out why it’s wrong, and how to make it right.”  Steven grasped that TPS is a system built around the ability to see problems and respond to them quickly. “It’s a simple thing to say, but the hard work is to keep pushing and pushing and pushing so you can see problems in greater detail, with greater accuracy, at smaller scale, sooner before they have a chance to become big problems. And everything else I think I’ve done since that moment ... has been elaboration on those points.”  The trio go on to discuss:  Steven’s immersion in Toyota led to the groundbreaking article, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,”2 which puts forward rules for how to design systems that establish standards, capture understanding, enable individuals to see when things go wrong, and then fix the problems they find.   High-Velocity Edge,3 Steven’s first book, was built on the insights that the way for companies to compete is on solving increasingly more problems at greater depth and breadth and faster (velocity). He eventually wrote Wiring the Winning Organization, which states more explicitly that “winner’s win because they’re just much better at seeing and solving problems than anybody else.”  Steven describes three layers behind the slowification, simplification, and amplification framework: 1) compete on ability to see and solve problems, 2) understand the instrumentation and ingenuity through which individuals work, and 3) architect the social circuitry in all processes, procedures, and routines by which the work of individuals is integrated into collective action toward common purpose.  A problem-solving danger zone for companies is when iteration and experimentation are inhibited. To get into a winning zone requires slowification (committed time and space to solve problems), simplification (simplify problems at the operating level rather than moving them up and down silos), and amplification (see problems earlier and more often when they are small).  Leaders need to liberate people’s ingenuity rather than maximize efficiency, according to Steven. “There’s too much in society where leaders think their job is to somehow collect data, do analysis, and then tell other people what to do.” While a fan of AI, Steven fears that leaders who are predisposed to data collection, analytics, and command and control management will turn AI into “an unholy devil for the rest of us” and dismiss creativity, dismiss ingenuity, and commitment to mission.  Steven and his co-author Gene Kim have tried to harmonize problem-solving ideas across different communities of thought. “We’ve all had the experience where someone says, ‘This must be a lean problem vs. a Six Sigma problem vs. a DevOps problem vs. an agile problem.’ Folks, it’s a people problem. That’s it. It’s people who are in a relationship and either relationships aren’t working because they can’t see problems, they can’t solve problems, or they can’t systematize what they learned. And so we thought we were doing some kind of service here to simplify the language so people could speak and collaborate across domains.” Optimism about organizations’ abilities to transform: “Outside in a personal life, [people are] striving so hard to be valued by others. This is not in sort of any kind narcissistic, weak way. It’s just this is what people try to do. This gets back to like our creative origins in that we want to do things useful and valuable to others. And then we bring them into the workplace, and we tell them none of that: we’re going to be demeaning of you, of your potential, your opportunity, your chance for appreciation. So all we’re saying is, what we've naturally been created or evolved to do, just extend that into the workplace. Mark, that’s my source of optimism because when you start having conversations with people that way and get them to talk about all the joy they have as coach of this, as head of that, as volunteer here, it’s like, don’t leave that at the door. Bring it in. And people, when you say, ‘Oh, that’s what you want me to do, yeah,’ they’re happy to do that.” 

Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, are joined by Jon Armstrong, Co-Founder and CEO of Do It American MFG Company, which produces goods for public utilities. Jon started the company in 2008 and is an advocate for U.S.-based manufacturing. Earlier in his career as a manager at Walker Corporation he learned about the Toyota Production System (TPS) directly from the eminent Hajime Oba while being assisted by the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC).   This month The Management Brief explores how leaders transform and rethink traditional management approaches to achieve success with lean. Jon remembers the “wonderful experience” of working alongside Mr. Oba “that honestly changed my life and resulted in some successes and the company that we’re building today.”  Jon learned TPS by doing and experimenting because Mr. Oba and TSSC staff would never directly advise a path to improvement: “One of the main things I learned real quick is — especially with Mr. Oba because he didn’t really say very much — you really had to work hard and pay attention to what he was paying attention to. That was the key thing, to try to understand in manufacturing and processes what was important. They would tell you, but they wouldn’t tell you by telling you. They’d tell you by paying attention to certain things.”  Some of highlights of the trio’s discussion includes:  Leadership style learned from Mr. Oba: “I just loved being around him,” says Jon. “He seemed like a nice guy. He took things so seriously, and there was such a sense about him of really caring — about not only the process and transferring the knowledge, but also a real caring for the people that were working within the process. I just really appreciated that. I try to do that as much as I can moving forward with the folks we’ve got here.”   Living the TSSC mission: Mark, who was a general manager at TSSC, says that Jon has realized the mission of TSSC to help organizations improve and keep manufacturing in the United States. Jon replies, “From TSSC, what they really gave me is that the learning I had gave me the confidence that we could do a manufacturing company and do it better than the people we were competing with. If you apply TPS — just some of the principles — and you do a good job of that, people using traditional methods are not going to be able to compete with you.”  Kaizen learnings from TSSC: The purpose of kaizen is not the improvement that is generated but learning how to improve. Jon says, “People think the way you improve is you do kaizen events; the kaizen event is the improvement. It wasn’t. Those are really training events. The kaizen event was to teach us how to do improvement.”  Respect people and promote problem solving: Josh recalls his visit to Do It American MFG, where he saw an “abundance” of respect for the people doing the work. For example, the company uses an andon system to assist employees when problems arise, to which leaders try to respond rapidly with assistance, not blame, to encourage the identification of problems. “If you’re responsive and you don’t blame them, they are much more willing to share and help become part of the problem-solving solution. It works really well. One thing we’ve done is we have taken the fear away.” Some employees have come from companies with a bad culture and, says Jon, “it’s fascinating how long it takes to unlearn what goes on if somebody works in a bad culture where they get beat up for making a mistake or causing a defect.” 

Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, talk with Carl Klemm, former General Motors and Toyota executive (including six years as President and CEO of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Poland). After retiring from Toyota in 2015, Carl founded Carl Klemm Management Solutions so he could continue to work with companies and share what he has learned about lean through the years.   This month The Management Brief explores how leaders transform and rethink traditional management approaches to achieve success with lean. Carl’s management thinking has certainly changed since he started as an apprentice with General Motors. Early in his career at GM, he saw that virtually everyone had a “dreadful” relationship with industrial engineering that wanted to improve processes, and then, when studying NUMMI, the Toyota-GM joint venture, realized that did not have to be the case.   After 24 years Carl left GM, joined Toyota, and was excited by what he could learn there. “I really wanted to join. I wanted to learn. I wanted to understand. I wanted to be able to do it, not just understand it, be able to do it and make it work.”  Carl, author of The Balance of Excellence,1 also discussed:  Toyota compared to GM: Senior executives at Toyota were more communicative with employees down through the organization, more management maturity on Toyota shopfloors, the long-term perspective of Toyota management, and “the planning and strategic activity is much more intense” at Toyota.  Importance of management to achieve results and develop people concurrently and in harmony: “Management’s job is to keep those wheels aligned. That’s a true key difference between Toyota and other organizations I’ve come across.”  The operational and cultural benefits of pulling the andon: The process of pulling the andon allows standard work and throughput to be maintained while a problem is addressed, and frontline members can see that they immediately get support for their work rather than “waiting for ages” for assistance to come.  Four levels of management maturity: The four levels of maturity — reactive, stabilizing (getting control of processes), proactive (beginning to do kaizen), and progressive — ultimately get leaders to a place where they understand that the organization underneath them is independently performing kaizen and they can focus on what the organization needs to achieve “in the coming five, 10, 15, 20 years. And, of course, Toyota does that. Toyota is thinking 25, 30 years ahead always.”  Advice for those getting started with lean: “First establish the situation of mutual trust and respect, because without that everything is difficult.” 

In this special dual-release edition of The Design Brief and The Management Brief, Josh Howell, LEI President, is joined by LEI veterans Jim Morgan, Senior Advisor, and Mark Reich, Senior Coach and Chief Engineer Strategy. These two lean heavyweights discuss two fundamental lean processes that are absolutely critical to transform and grow an enterprise: lean product and process development (LPPD) and hoshin kanri.  Jim is a former Ford Global Engineering Director and Rivian Chief Operating Officer. He co-authored The Toyota Product Development System and Designing the Future, both of which elements of LPPD, a system for developing new products and services and their required value streams. Jim co-authored The Toyota Product Development System and Designing the Future, both of which explore elements of LPPD, a system for developing new products and services and the processes needed to produce and deliver them. LPPD surfaces and resolves issues across the product-development value stream in order to minimize time- and profit-consuming wastes and rework.  Mark, a 23-year veteran of Toyota, including work in Corporate Strategy at the automaker, recently authored Managing on Purpose, which explores hoshin kanri and how it aligns enterprises at every level — C-suite through the frontline — via a shared common purpose, problem solving, and continuous learning. Since 2011 when he joined LEI, Mark has successfully helped many executives apply hoshin kanri and transform their companies in a variety of business sectors.   For executives not yet familiar with LPPD and hoshin kanri — especially those leading and growing enterprises — this discussion should be eye-opening. Jim and Mark reveal these two processes as not operations-only tools but game-changing methods for corporate leaders to transform their organizations. They describe the importance of these powerful processes to overall business success, their successes at Toyota and other lean organizations, and how the processes can significantly help any business, big or small.  Stay connected to the latest thinking in lean management. Subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletters and learn from leaders and practitioners worldwide.  The Management Brief is a weekly newsletter from the Lean Enterprise Institute that bridges the gap between theory and practice in lean management.  Subscribe to The Management Brief https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7257008468853760000  The Design Brief is a weekly newsletter devoted to improving organizations’ innovation capability.  Subscribe The Design Brief https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7201676363261501442  

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Eric Ethington and Matt Zayko about how to build strong teams and robust product and process development systems, and why doing so takes a skilled chief engineer. Eric Ethington is a senior coach and Chief Engineer, Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD) at The Lean Enterprise Institute. Matt Zayko is global head of the Lean Office at GE HealthCare. Eric and Matt are also coauthors of the book, The Power of Process: A Story of Innovative Lean Process Development.   The conversation explores:   The key skills every chief engineer needs to be effective and “lead with responsibility, not authority”   How chief engineers can begin the work of “designing the value stream”  Why conflict is necessary to create good products and how to manage conflict with care   System integration and how chief engineers optimize work at the product level, balancing the inputs and needs of product development and manufacturing, for example  Real stories of product and process development where Eric and Matt have seen teams persevere and use LPPD thinking to innovate and achieve success     Read Eric and Matt’s article “9 Tips to Better Process Development” here.    Get Started with Lean Product & Process Development  Improving how you develop and deliver products doesn’t require a full transformation to start—it begins with learning to see problems clearly, involve your team, and improve how work gets done.  Explore your next step:  Read Designing the Future or The Power of Process  Take the 60-minute Lean Product and Process Development Overview course  Join the coach-led online Designing the Future Workshop for hands-on practice, and the in-person Introduction to Lean Process Development course Oct 7  Bring a coach into your organization for customized support  Let’s take the first step—together. Learn more at lean.org/LPPD » 

Two leaders of the Cleveland Clinic’s lean improvement function — Dr. Lisa Yerian, Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical & Operational Improvement Officer, and Chad Cummings, Vice President of Lean Transformation & Continuous Improvement — speak with Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy. The podcast continues our focus this month on the role of continuous improvement (CI) groups in lean management.  The Cleveland Clinic consists of 23 hospitals, 280 outpatient locations, approximately 83,000 caregivers, and nearly 16 million patient encounters annually. The vision at the not-for-profit healthcare system is to be “the best place to receive care anywhere and the best place to work,” says Lisa. “We have integrated the expectation of excellence, the aspiration for excellence, in everything we do right in parallel with being the best place to work.”    Chad came out of manufacturing and first encountered lean in the 1990s, working for a Japanese-owned auto supplier, and has been working in healthcare for more than a decade in a CI capacity. Lisa started her career in healthcare, after growing up in a rural area that did not have access to high-quality healthcare and wanting to change that. At the Cleveland Clinic she was getting pulled into meetings about recurring problems, and eventually got connected to an internal team focused on using lean principles. “I saw lean as an opportunity to do what I had initially wanted to do, which was make a bigger difference for more people.” She then landed a new medical director role with the improvement team and began learning through “small amounts of coursework and books but really through doing, a lot with Chad and others on our lean team and with members of LEI.”  The two executives discussed the many challenges facing healthcare today. Chad cites macro issues of high demand for care, fiscal difficulties, and finding skilled labor. The pandemic contributed to those challenges, says Lisa, resulting in high turnover and a subsequent need to develop people for their changing roles and build the capability for effective problem solving, huddle management, and understanding data. She also says workplace violence has risen in healthcare, contributing to burnout and turnover and adding security costs to fiscal woes.   Lisa and Chad also discussed:  How to work with those in healthcare who have rejected the efficacy of lean: “If you are asking someone to support or believe, that’s too big, it’s too broad. Nobody knows what that means,” says Lisa. “What is it that you really need to get out of this interaction? Do you need them to commit to going on a gemba walk with you? What is it that your ask really is?... You need to get specific quickly in order to try to address that. And then what are you trying to accomplish here?”  A need to revisit some lean improvement practices following COVID: “We did a lot of work to develop a culture of improvement prior to COVID; we had built a tiered daily huddle system, kaizen system, a lot of problem-solving capability and awareness,” says Lisa. “In my role I realized we need to go back and reinvigorate some of that work, repeat some of that work, redo some of that work,” and re-educate leaders on how to perform their roles.  How an adherence to the lean transformation framework helps to point CI actions to problems that need to be addressed: This starts by asking, “What is the problem we’re trying to solve, what’s our true value-driven purpose?” notes Lisa.  The importance of developing people: “If we want to make a change in our culture, we have to really think about what behaviors, right behaviors or correct behaviors, we want to drive, but even prior to that thinking about routines,” says Chad. “Do we have the right routines in place that help to establish those behaviors. And to establish those routines you have to build capability in people. You have to give them the knowhow of what good looks like.”  Want to take these ideas further?   Go beyond the page and see lean leadership in action. The Lean Leadership Learning Tour (Nov. 10–13, 2025) takes you inside Toyota, GE Appliances, and Summit Polymers to witness real-world problem-solving, leadership development, and transformation at scale. Bring a colleague, align your vision, and return ready to accelerate change.   Learn more » 

Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, talk with Rich Calvaruso, Senior Director of the Lean Management Office for GE Appliances. Rich — with GE for 36 years and the leader of GE Appliances’ continuous improvement (CI) group for 15 of those years — has been instrumental in driving lean thinking and practice for the company. He says the purpose of his group is to “develop people and improve process at the same time.”  GE Appliances started its first lean activities in 2005, says Rich, and applied lean to a model line and got good results that impressed leadership. This was at a time when the company was using overseas contract manufacturers and concluded that in addition to designing products they needed to again make things back in the U.S.   In 2009 GE Appliances began to build back its U.S. manufacturing capability and reshore products to Louisville, KY. “[After] two years of planning, we launched that first plant. It did not go as great as you’d want from a launch standpoint,” Rich concedes. “But, I think, in retrospect, it was about as good as we could have done, considering the fact that we had lost a lot of capability over the years in this space, and we were having to build that back. You can build a plant and bring a product back, but there’s a lot more that goes into manufacturing than the product and the building.”  From that humbling restart as a lean manufacturer, GE Appliances proceeded to become the No. 1 appliance maker in the U.S. Each time the company reshored a product, it took actions to continuously get better. “We tried to get our costs right. We tried to get our quality right. We tried to get our lead times down,” says Rich. “We are a U.S. manufacturer that supplies our products to the U.S. market. So for us, making products close to the customer is super important because shipping this stuff around the world is tough.” Rich likes the LEI-coined term of “leanshoring,” because “you’re not just bringing back what you lost. You have to do it differently. You have to think about it differently.”   Rich also tells Josh and Jeff that:  Kaizen events are beneficial and do provide change and learning, but they lack the “stickiness” to change culture and leave a lot of people out of lean capability development. GE Appliances moved from events to systems, such as standardized work and how to improve the work, and focused on getting results and developing capabilities of people across production.  Leader lean capabilities were developed at the company through the Immersion training program for senior leaders and plant managers. “It was humbling for them,” says Rich. “We made them experience the work of a team member on the line. It created some empathy. But also they go to see not only how the tool works but the whole social aspect of how you make change.”  Those trying to spread lean broader throughout their organizations have to have perseverance and expect some things won’t go as planned. Rich encourages those supporting lean to “learn as much as you can and do as much as you can... Go do it with them. If you really want to spread this, go find somebody who has a business problem and partner up with them and try to solve it together. That’s the best way to get people on board.”  He looks for certain characteristics for those on his CI team: “You don’t have to know really anything about the lean toolset or lean thinking, but you do have to be humble and you have to be a learner. If you have those two characteristics, I’ll hire you. Then we’ll basically put you out on the floor and start to teach you the process, and it takes a while.”   Want to take these ideas further?   Go beyond the page and see lean leadership in action. The Lean Leadership Learning Tour (Nov. 10–13, 2025) takes you inside Toyota, GE Appliances, and Summit Polymers to witness real-world problem-solving, leadership development, and transformation at scale. Bring a colleague, align your vision, and return ready to accelerate change.   Learn more »