Joining me today for Episode #330 of the podcast is Christoph Roser, a professor of production management at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in Germany. He has decades of experience with Lean manufacturing including time with Toyota in Japan, as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, and as a Lean expert and manager at Robert Bosch GmbH. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. He is author of the book Faster, Better, Cheaper in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond. You can read his full bio here, via his excellent blog AllAboutLean.com. Today's discussion was sparked by his series of blog posts about his “grand tour” of automotive factories in Japan. You can read those or check out his overview blog post here. We'll talk about the differences between some of these companies, a bit about Lean in healthcare, and we'll discuss Christoph's concerns about the way Toyota's culture might be changing under CEO Akio Toyoda.