Wlei - Lean Enterprise Institute's Podcast

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 wa