Wlei - Lean Enterprise Institute's Podcast

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Jay Multanen and Jared Ragozzine from Bestbath, a manufacturer specializing in showers and bathtubs for both commercial and residential buildings. Jay is the co-CEO, while Jared is Director of Lean and Continuous Improvement.  During the conversation we touch on:   Organizational Transformation: Gain insights into how Bestbath has built a problem-solving culture through methodical structural changes and targeted people development strategies.  Competitive Differentiation: Understand how adopting lean practices has not only streamlined their operations but conferred a significant competitive edge in the market.  Strengthening Partnerships: Learn how lean thinking has fortified Bestbath's relationships with their construction trade partners, thereby enhancing collaborative opportunities.  Profit-Share Model: Explore Bestbath's innovative profit-sharing scheme that has been pivotal in fostering the right behaviors across all levels, from the C-suite t

In the latest episode of the WLEI podcast, we delve into hoshin kanri (strategy deployment) with Otto Funke and Joseph Tamayo from GlobalFoundries, a global leader in semiconductor manufacturing. Otto has overseen the strategic planning process at one of GlobalFoundries' production facilities for sixteen years. He will share insights on how the site has developed a robust process that has withstood leadership changes. Alongside Joseph, they will explore how this process creates alignment around objectives, both vertically and horizontally, enabling front-line workers to link their tasks to broader corporate goals. Furthermore, they will shed light on how this strategic approach is instrumental in cultivating GlobalFoundries' next generation of leaders. Otto and Joseph will host a learning session on hoshin kanri at the Lean Summit on March 19-20 with optional workshops on March 21-22. Register by October 31 to save up to $900 on your registration. Click here to learn more and register.

In the latest episode of the WLEI podcast, we explore the topic of organizational change with Dr. Lynn Kelley, former vice president of supply chain and continuous improvement at Union Pacific Railroad and author of the new book Change Questions. Kelley posits that there is no such thing as a fixed plan for a successful transformation. Leaders must approach change situationally, recognizing they face unique challenges no single method could address. In her book, she proposes a series of questions that methodically guide management to implement change and measure its impact: What is your value-driven purpose? What is the work to be done to achieve the purpose or to solve the problem? How will you engage and develop employees? How will you establish a supportive management system with the appropriate leader behaviors? What are your organization's beliefs, values, norms, attitudes and assumptions? By grappling with these questions, leaders will be able to design and implement a lasting transformat

In the latest episode of the WLEI podcast, we take a deep dive into a new venture whose goal is to rekindle America’s industrial tradition. Re:Build Manufacturing was founded by former Amazon executive Jeff Wilke in 2021. We sat down with its CEO Miles Arnone and Chief Lean officer Bonnie Davis to learn about Re:Build Manufacturing’s purpose and how it fulfills it. For decades U.S. manufacturers swept up by the opportunity to maximize profits with low-cost labor have been offshoring manufacturing. But the short-term boost in profits has generated long-term, unintended consequences. Communities that once thrived on manufacturing experienced severe economic downturns. This decline led to increased economic inequality, as those who lost their jobs struggled to find employment that matched their skills and offered comparable wages. Also, manufacturers struggled to protect their innovations as overseas suppliers threatened intellectual property theft or infringement. And the offshoring trend has eroded America's m

While Lean can trace its direct roots to the production system launched by Toyota more than 50 years ago, its timeless appeal translates into immediate practical countermeasures in a surprising number of situations. What A Unicorn Knows, a terrific new book by authors Matt May and Pablo Dominguez, proves this by presenting a comprehensive application of lean principles that couldn’t be more timely. Join us for their conversation with WLEI host Tom Ehrenfeld for a wide-ranging exploration of the deep relevance of lean for growing companies today.

What is the best way to tackle complex problems? Getting better at this perennial challenge certainly fuels the beating heart of lean practice. It is the key theme in author Paolo Savaget's new book, The Four Workarounds: Strategies from the World’s Scrappiest Organizations for Tackling Complex Problems. He discusses his findings with WLEI host Tom Ehrenfeld.

Lean practice has always coexisted with technology that enables the human operators to do their job better—in the service of delivering more value with less waste to the customer. But do today’s digitized, information-saturated, workplaces provide so much assistance that the machines actually get in the way? In his new book, Augmented Lean, co-author Natan Linder talks with WLEI host Tom Ehrenfeld about how Tulip, the company he co-founded to provide a “human-centric framework for managing frontline operations,” seeks to delegate technology and improvement to the operators doing the key lean work.

Lean veteran Billy Taylor, author of the new book The Winning Link: A Proven Process to Define, Align, and Execute Strategy at Every Level, discusses with WLEI Host Tom Ehrenfeld how to cultivate "extreme leadership" as a means of building a cohesive and top-tier organization. Bill shares a "connected operating system" that, he says, helps people and organizations define and achieve ambitious goals. He learned and developed this approach through decades of success at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.

Organizing a restaurant kitchen is a daunting task to think about. Find and establish the problems at hand, implement an improved process to adhere to those problems. It all lends itself towards increased profitability, more respect for the workers with emphasis on value-creating work, increased tact-time; but its also much easier said than done. A flagship restaurant worked with LEI coaches and learned to increase their profitability through the lens of storytelling, where each piece is an innate - and respected - part of the whole. Listen in to hear how this all came together, and also check out the case study complementing this podcast. 

Regret, the pervasive and often toxic emotional mess most of us invariably experience, need not be so painful, says best-selling author Dan Pink. In fact, his new book The Power of Regret counsels readers to deliberately view regret as a process that can be examined in a way to help us all lead better lives. This WLEI podcast with host Tom Ehrenfeld explores how Pink came to this conclusion and explores parallels between his approach to processing regret and Lean’s mindful approach to framing problems for continuous improvement.

In 2021 Toyota Motor became the first manufacturer from outside the United States to sell the most cars in the USA. While this news hook may very well prove to be transient, it raises key issues about what has accounted for the company’s success. What aspects of Toyota’s vaunted production system, which is foundational for lean, have supported its success? How does Toyota’s approach contrast with a company such as Tesla? How can companies productively balance the need to develop products that dazzle consumers with the need to simultaneously develop the brilliant processes that produce these coveted items?   Join LEI founder Jim Womack and LEI President Josh Howell in a conversation hosted by Tom Ehrenfeld about lean’s enduring value in today’s time of discontinuity.

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, Matt Savas sits down with LEI President Josh Howell and Richard Vellante, Executive Director of Community and Training Events at LEI. They discuss the labor shortage and recent supply chain issues with the perspectives and intuition, as well as addressing recent blames towards lean within the supply chain industry.  Leadership is at the center of these topics, with Rich's experience as an Executive Chef lending some hands on nuance to the conversation. Leaders should be hard on the process, not the people getting accustomed to that process.  NFT's are also discussed, as their ever developing trajectory in the media landscape surely can borrow a thing or two from the way that lean thinkers lead and act. 

How much of your work time do you spend doing actual work that leverages what you do best? And how much of your invaluable time and focus is chipped away by myriad distractions—of which the most pernicious might be email and its constant demand for your attention. I’m Tom Ehrenfeld, host of the Lean Enterprise Institute’s WLEI podcast. I spoke with author Cal Newport about his newest book, A World Without Email, where he challenges us to rethink why we need to be constantly plugged into communication that seldom helps us produce valuable work.  

As we slowly emerge from the long pandemic, LEI and colleagues like the Good Jobs Institute are deeply committed to helping produce decent jobs. In this conversation, LEI President Josh Howell spoke with Executive Director Sarah Kalloch of the Good Jobs Institute about ways they are both working to help foster good work. WLEI Host Tom Ehrenfeld moderated this conversation.   Download a transcript of the conversation here.    

Roger Martin’s terrific new book When More is Not Better proposes tangible suggestions for broadening the economic gains from democratic capitalism. He critiques the concentration of wealth and power that decades of what he calls America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency have generated, proposing tangible measures for business leaders, politicians, educators and citizens to pursue. In this conversation with LEI Host Tom Ehrenfeld, Roger explores lean-adjacent measures that complement his message. What operational, approaches might be considered in concert with his policy-based and systematic suggestions?     Download a transcript of this talk here.  

Lean done right can dramatically boost the value of any enterprise over the long term, argues Cliff Ransom. For decades Cliff has been analyzing the value of companies by researching and above all visiting them to suss out the integrity of their lean practice. His detailed reports (by his firm Ransom Research) on the performance of companies such as Danaher, GE, Fortive, and many others are closely followed by a passionate slice of the investment world. The following conversation drills down into the lessons learned from looking at public companies through lean-colored glasses.     Click Here to download a transcript of the conversation.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg makes a bold promise in his new book, What’s Your Problem? (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). He seeks to upgrade people’s ability to solve problems by understanding how to solve the right problems. Learning to reframe problems can help people to stop chasing the wrong solutions, better understand what they are grappling with, and, in some cases find radically better solutions. Join us in listening to his insights on ways that everyone can boost their ability to solve the right problems. Click here to download a full transcript of the conversation.

The global pandemic coupled with profound structural economic shifts are two daunting challenges reinforcing  the need for a powerful method of framing and facing crucial problems today. Over the past year, our monthly podcast WLEI has aired conversations with Jim Womack, Dan Jones, Karen Gaudet, and other thought leaders exploring the power of lean—and adjacent schools of thought—as a source of promising countermeasures.  Lean can help people face problems both large (reviving healthy enterprise in this economy) and small (clarifying tangible ways to create workplaces that respect their workers). Thinkers such as Dan Heath discussed the power of solving problems completely--but more importantly, preventing them from happening in the first place. Author/coach Karen Gaudet explained how a disciplined system of standard work can create a workplace that is resilient enough to respond to unimaginable tragedy.  And while tackling external problems is vital, many individuals also noted the need for lean to square

Professor Jeffrey Liker’s The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles From the World’s Greatest Manufacturer has proved to be one of the most influential books of the lean movement—and beyond. Last month he published a revised second edition of this classic resource, bringing new thinking and context to his explanation of what makes this system so dynamic and enduring. Liker explains his emphasis on what scholar Takahiro Fujimoto calls its “superior evolutionary learning capability,” providing more grit and clarity on topics such as its organic (not mechanistic) nature. Listen to him discuss these topics with LEI Senior Editor Tom Ehrenfeld in this new edition of the WLEI podcast. You can download a PDF of the transcript at https://www.lean.org/Search/Documents/600.pdf

The long-term success of companies like Danaher, Fortive, Herman Miller, Parker Hannifin and many others, have all validated the power of lean thinking and practice. But if that’s the case, why aren’t there more exemplars? And why do so many companies either intentionally misconstrue Lean, or fail to realize its full promise over time? Long-time Lean veteran Mark Deluzio has recently published Flatlined: Why Lean Transformations Fail and What to Do About It. Join him, Art Byrne, Jim Womack and host Tom Ehrenfeld in a wide-ranging conversation about the ongoing gap between operations at most companies—and an ideal Lean state. Be sure to download an edited transcript of their conversation here.