Episodi

  • Cutting through the Noise in Tech: Sarah Milstein's Advice for Leaders Who Want to Keep People Focused on Value Creation

    Cutting through the Noise in Tech: Sarah Milstein's Advice for Leaders Who Want to Keep People Focused on Value Creation
    Dec 4 2025

    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

    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    25 min
  • Keeping Our Humanity in Tech: Julia Austin on Why It Pays to Put People First in Product Development

    Keeping Our Humanity in Tech: Julia Austin on Why It Pays to Put People First in Product Development
    Nov 20 2025

    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
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    22 min
  • Designing Work to More Effectively Solve the Right Problems

    Designing Work to More Effectively Solve the Right Problems
    Nov 11 2025
    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 ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    1 ora e 2 min
  • Steven Spear Talks about Competing with TPS and Problem Solving

    Steven Spear Talks about Competing with TPS and Problem Solving
    Nov 4 2025
    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 ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    57 min
  • The Management Brief | Leaning on TPS Learnings to Create a U.S. Manufacturer

    The Management Brief | Leaning on TPS Learnings to Create a U.S. Manufacturer
    Oct 14 2025

    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.”
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    46 min
  • The Management Brief | Transforming from GM Executive to Toyota Leader

    The Management Brief | Transforming from GM Executive to Toyota Leader
    Oct 7 2025

    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.”
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    44 min
  • The Management Brief Bonus Edition | Two Lean Luminaries and Two Processes for Lean Transformation

    The Management Brief Bonus Edition | Two Lean Luminaries and Two Processes for Lean Transformation
    Sep 29 2025

    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

    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    1 ora e 5 min
  • The Design Brief | Eric Ethington and Matt Zayko on Why it Takes a Chief Engineer to Design Profitable Value Streams

    The Design Brief | Eric Ethington and Matt Zayko on Why it Takes a Chief Engineer to Design Profitable Value Streams
    Sep 25 2025

    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 »

    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    27 min