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.

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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 »

Simon Rowley and Julian Ball join Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, and continue this month’s discussion about the role of continuous improvement (CI) groups in lean management. Simon is Senior Manager at the Toyota Lean Management Centre (TLMC) in the UK, and Julian is Section Manager. TLMC was started by Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK in 2009 to support companies in the UK interested in implementing the Toyota Production System (TPS).

The two TLMC executives describe the startup of the center and how it initially enabled Toyota UK to employ and improve staff during a financial downturn. “They saw this as an opportunity for development of their own people, going out to clients and helping them and coaching them in TPS and the Toyota Way, develop them to then go rotate back into the business and make our business stronger,” says Julian. The best way to get better at TPS, adds Simon, is to practice, and TLMC offers team members opportunities to practice with diverse industries, people, problems, and environments.

On the podcast Simon and Julian also talk about:

• Training programs they bring to clients in the UK, including Rolls Royce, and their work in industries beyond manufacturing, such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and high tech. “The thinking way can be implemented into all of these sectors,” says Julian.

• The approach of TLMC team members with clients compared to staff at Toyota’s internal CI group, the Operations Management Development Division (OMDD): “When we’re here at Toyota and having a discussion about TPS, it’s OK to assume that everyone has some level of knowledge and you can start using terms and think of activities you’re going to do and everybody is kind of on the same page,” notes Simon. “If you go to an external enterprise, first of all you have to change the way you communicate to people.”

• Advice for companies new to TPS and wanting to get started with improvements: get at least some advice from a lean expert, don’t get too ambitious when starting with lean, begin small in an area and with people who have expressed an interest in lean improvements, make sure of who needs to be on board to make it work, and don’t worry about getting it wrong.

• People development and TPS: “Unless you’re developing your people in your organization, you’ll never maximize the potential of TPS, you’ll get just little bits of improvement,” says Simon.

• The importance of standardized work: “Standardized work allows us to build high-quality vehicles safely every single cycle,” say Julian. “The other part of that is it’s the members’ safety net. We’ll train you how to do something and, of course, if you do it this way every single time you will stay safe and you will build that quality vehicle. We’re avoiding any of these conflicts of who did it wrong and why didn’t you do it like this. We just follow the standardized work... If I work this way, I can’t do anything wrong.”

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 and Mark Reich, LEI President and Chief Engineer Strategy, respectively, speak with Jamie Bonini, President of the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), a not-for-profit corporation affiliated with Toyota Motor North America. Since 1992, TSSC has shared Toyota know-how with more than 500 small- to mid-sized companies, government entities, and non-profits.

This week’s discussion kicks off a month of The Management Brief content around the role of continuous improvement (CI) groups in lean management. As the leader of TSSC, Jamie interacts with many organizations’ CI groups as they apply basic concepts of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and helps others develop CI groups for that objective.

Prior to Toyota, Jamie worked at Chrysler and DaimlerChrysler, spending a decade applying TPS there and believing he understood it well. “I was absolutely stunned and amazed by how much more there was to TPS than I was able to learn by reading externally and even working with former Toyota people that were helping us when I was at Chrysler and DaimlerChrysler.” While at TSSC he’s found there is often a similar big gap in what those outside of Toyota think of TPS — frequently narrower than the Toyota approach of developing “a culture of highly engaged people that are solving problems and innovating to drive performance.”

On the podcast Jamie discusses:

• Toyota’s internal CI group: Operations Management Development Division (OMDD) works with plants, suppliers, logistics, dealers, and other entities connected to Toyota for TPS support work and to develop people (“TPS is 80% hands-on learn by doing, experiential learning, it’s learning through practice,” says Jamie). OMDD also will be involved by adding resources needed for quick-hit plant changes as well as new plant design and layout.

• Differences between OMDD and TSSC: OMMD focuses mostly, but not exclusively, on the technical tools and practices of TPS because the Toyota Way philosophy and the managerial roles and structures are regularly reinforced throughout the automaker and its partners. Outside of Toyota, TSSC must address not only the technical side but the philosophy and managerial aspects (design of the organization) of TPS.

• Perspective of CI groups: When Jamie started with Chrysler, just as TPS and lean was becoming known, most organizations did not have CI groups. Today most have established some form of CI group, and “now the need for that function is recognized and staffed.” The CI groups today, however, typically are a training and coaching support function (needed and helpful), “but, in most cases, I think more can be done.” There is an overemphasis on “tools to be installed” and not enough emphasis on a building a culture of highly engaged people to solve problems and working with very senior leaders to solve problems.

• Building capability in leaders and managers: As TSSC works on a nine- to 12-month pilot project with an organization to achieve a specific business result, it’s also developing leaders who can then sustain and spread TPS. During that time senior executives undergo a three- to four-day workshop where they solve actual problems on the frontline and learn how to coach problem solving. “Almost all the time we get the same feedback, which is, ‘Wow. We have a lot more problems out there than I had realized that can be solved. There’s a lot more improvement tension than I realized. This problem-solving method is pretty simple ... but the actual practice is difficult. If we want our people to be able do this type of problem solving on a regular basis, we’re really going to have to provide management that is going to support and develop them in that.”

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Sebastian Fixson, PhD, of Babson College, on mentoring the next generation of leaders in lean product and process development (LPPD). Sebastian is the founding faculty director of the doctor of business administration) program and professor of innovation and design, at Babson, where he focuses on helping people and organizations build innovation capabilities.

Jim Morgan, senior advisor on LPPDat LEI, joins Sebastian and me for this wide-ranging conversation in which we discuss:

• How to get emerging product leaders to slow down and leverage LPPD to build stronger teams and better businesses

• How engineers can use LPPD to become more effective business leaders by understanding how the larger business works

• Sebastian’s advice to product leaders on how to understand both the physical and digital side of the business (as well as how LPPD supports this effort)

• How to build “process thinkers”, not just product development leaders
• Where Sebastian sees hope for innovative product development processes, organizations, and/or new ways of working to solve global challenges

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 »