The Lean CEO: Leading the Way to World-Class Excellence (2015)
The Lean CEO, winner of the 2019 Shingo Publication Award, explores enterprise-wide Lean adoption through in-depth interviews with some of the best known Lean-practicing CEOs. Readers learn first hand how these exceptional leaders applied Lean to boost profitability, empower employees, and forge closer bonds with customers and suppliers.
The Lean CEOs, who represent organizations from 50 to 50,000 employees, speak to readers inside and outside the Lean community. These are leaders who have diverged from conventional business practices and achieved remarkable results. Readers will gain new perspectives on problems such as global competition, fixing healthcare, addressing alienation and cynicism in the workplace, and putting businesses on a sustainable footing.
The book is organized around 10 major challenges that the CEOs faced when they began their Lean transformations:
- A New Way Out Of Financial Crisis
- Capacity Without Capital Expenditure
- A Realistic Approach to Worker Motivation
- Building Collaborative Management Teams
- Putting People First
- Building the Learning Organization
- Integrating a Diversified Corporation
- Reducing Dependence on the CEO
- Solving the Cost / Quality Conundrum in Healthcare
- Defining and Delivering Value in Government
As the stories demonstrate, Lean is a powerful delivery mechanism that applies real substance to these challenges. This isn’t about leaders developing a new management style. It’s about executing plans of action using the same methods that propelled Japan’s stunning turnaround in the wake of World War II.
The narratives from the Lean CEOs are fresh, candid, and often provocative. They openly challenge many common business practices, such as standard cost accounting, top-down management, emphasis on batch sizes and economies of scale, and our obsession with computers. Their advice carries the authority of leaders who have followed an alternative path and delivered remarkable results.
The book is written for readers inside and outside of the Lean community. Lean practitioners and managers will find dozens of insights on how Lean efforts are perceived by senior managers, board members, customers, and suppliers. Those new to Lean will learn how Lean changes organizations, what those changes require, and about the many opportunities that Lean presents.
Find it at:
CEO Insights from The Lean CEO
On Leadership:
“In your first 2 or 3 years as CEO, you’re mostly looking at problems that somebody else created. Then all of a sudden, after 10 years, there is not a problem that is not your problem. You created every one of them, maybe unwittingly, but you created them all.”
Brian Walker, CEO, Herman Miller Inc.
“Accountability is very important. But it’s not what I thought it was. It’s not about setting goals and then shaming people who don’t hit the goals. That’s not what accountability is. Accountability is about making sure that everybody understands where we’re trying to go.”
Jim Lancaster, CEO, Lantech Inc.
“Showing your human side to people, and asking questions, and not knowing the answers is a hard thing for any leader to do, because at the end of the day you’re the one that has to be the last one in the lifeboat, you have to be the last one to leave, you have to be the rock of Gibraltar for everyone. Balancing those two is really where true collaboration begins and you’re able to make great things happen.”
Karl Wadensten, CEO, Vibco Vibrators Inc.
On Learning:
“You also have to truly believe in diversity of thought and ideas, and that new ideas can come from the shop floor just as well from an executive office. I need to be able to learn from people just as they can learn from me.”
Mark Richards, CEO, Appvion
“If anything, I felt bad about the number of things we were abandoning. And in hindsight, maybe that’s not a bad thing. The more you try, the more you can abandon, as long as you understand the underlying reasons in each case for why something didn’t work. It’s about that learning in itself.”
Kevin Meyer, former CEO, Specialty Silicone
“We’re building a learning factory, not just a production factory. And Lean is really good at that, because Lean is already a learning system – even on the production side it is very learning oriented. So we’re taking the same ethos, but now applying it to a very different problem in a slightly different way.”
Eric Ries, CEO, The Lean Startup
On Lean Government:
“By empowering our people to improve the processes that define their workplace, we can tap a powerful force that will lead the way to a stronger, more prosperous world.”
Governor Dannel P. Malloy, State of Connecticut
“Government is not known for embracing risk. But Lean requires a willingness to try improvements, see how they work, and refine them. You have to be willing to make mistakes. That can be a challenge for agencies and management that are comfortable with long-established processes and systems.”
Governor Jay Inslee, State of Washington
On Fixing Healthcare:
“Healthcare is the largest industry, the most broken industry, and maybe the most important one. In my view of what Lean needed to do, it needed to help healthcare to culminate, if you will, what Lean should contribute to society.”
George Koenigsaecker, former President, Jacob’s Vehicle Manufacturing Company
“These principles and practices we’ve established are a way out from the cynicism, from the overworking, from the overburden, from the massive waste that exists in the delivery of healthcare. As we expose managers, leaders, CEOs, senior executives to this by having them come and actually see it in action, they absolutely get it, they absolutely say this is the way we should be working and this is what we should be doing.”
John Toussaint, CEO, Thedacare
On Respect for People
“Lean is one of the most advanced people systems in the world for getting people to realize their capabilities in terms of coming to work every day to do their jobs and to improve their jobs.”
Gary Kaplan, CEO, Virginia Mason Medical Center
“Most people want to have an argument about stretch goals. They say people will quit. I think that’s a foolish way to look at it, and disrespectful of your people. What you’re really saying is, “I don’t think my people can achieve such a thing.”
Art Byrne, former CEO, Wiremold
“If a person has autism, or Down syndrome, or cerebral palsy, that might have implications for how they learn, but it doesn’t mean that they can’t do the work. Our job is to align the needs of the customer with the capabilities of our workers and the way they experience the work, and Lean does that very well.”
Tom Everill, CEO, Northwest Center
“We need to do this for the reason that we want to take our people to a better place, and that Lean is a way of fully engaging people in the process of continuous improvement, and allows them to feel appreciated and validated for the gifts that they share with us.”
Bob Chapman, CEO, Barry-Wehmiller
On Organizational Culture
“I can’t imagine anybody not having a continuous improvement culture or process inside his or her company. Lean’s not the only way to do this, but I think it’s the simplest. It’s the simplest way to look directly at a line of sight to the customer, and to rally people around that customer experience.”
Mike Lamach, CEO, Ingersoll Rand
“I always tell people that if we have a real high performer who is weak in terms of culture, we’re very impatient there. We’d much rather keep someone I call great in the locker room. If we had a great quarterback, and he was just an absolute jerk, I’d get a new quarterback.”
Dan Ariens, CEO, Ariens Company
“Lean is a structured process that makes it possible for 300 people do things the way I believe my father did when this was a one man shop. So it brings me back to the days when it was just my father and me in the company.”
Paul Steffes, CEO, Steffes Corporation
On Strategy
“The problem is the perception is that when you get your monthly report, you now know about the vital issues in the business. And Lean would say, and I would say even more strongly from my experience, that you don’t know the details of the business based upon accounting.”
Pat Lancaster, Co-Founder and former CEO, Lantech
What readers are saying…
“Give this book to your CEO. It captures the passion, challenges, fun and impressive results achieved by pioneering Lean CEOs. Now you know what is involved, you can do so too.”
Daniel T Jones, author of The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking and Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy in the UK
“What a triumph of a book on lean leadership—connecting the early history of lean and management theories with seminal examples of lean leaders and organizations in action! This is a unique and compelling read which will serve to inspire and guide.”
Amir Dan Rubin, President and CEO, Stanford Health Care, Stanford University
“Finally in this book we learn the lesson so often missed. Lean is a total enterprise approach to adaptation and prosperity that must be understood and owned by the CEO.”
Jeffrey K Liker, Professor, University of Michigan and author of The Toyota Way
“Few books get into the hearts and minds of successful CEOs like Stoller’s does! Read this and learn what leading from the top truly means.”
Karen Martin, President, The Karen Martin Group, and co-author, Value Stream Mapping
“A great book that applies not just to CEOs but to every leader. The Lean CEO spans the test of time, industries, and countries to hit home on the fundamentals of building a world-class organization. The steps are logical, practical, and well written in this easy to read, insightful book.”
Doug Taylor, Vice President, Carlisle Operating System, Carlisle Companies Inc.
“The Lean CEO allows the reader to join executive leaders as they take you through their journey of learning. Hear their lessons while they were knee-deep in the hands-on process of leadership, change, and implementation – with all the bumps, bruises, and successes along the way.”
Jim Huntzinger, President and Founder, Lean Frontiers
“If you are about to embark on your Lean journey, or are already en route, Lean CEO is your travel guide. Why go on a trip without learning from the best of the best who have been there before you?”
Earll M. Murman, MIT Ford Professor of Engineering Emeritus, Co-author of Lean Enterprise Value: Insights from MIT’s Lean Aerospace Initiative
“A must read, to grasp the spirit of real lean, as told by the first hand experience of exceptional lean leaders.”
Michael Ballé, co-author of Lean trilogy The Gold Mine, The Lean Manager and Lead With Respect