Connecting the Dots

Tilo Schwarz is a leadership coach, former plant manager and co-founder of the Campus for Leaders at the University of Applied Science Ansbach. He helps managers to successfully lead change and empower their teams for improvement, adaptiveness, and superior results. During his time as a plant manager at a renowned German power-tool manufacturer, he started practicing Toyota Kata with his management team as part of Mike Rother's groundbreaking research in 2006. By doing so, Tilo and his team established continuous improvement as a daily routine throughout all processes and areas of the plant. That led to winning the A. T. Kearny operational excellence competition "Factory of the Year" and a WHU/INSEAD Industrial Excellence Award. Tilo is the author of several books on coaching and Toyota Kata.

Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor Emeritus, Industrial and Operations Engineering at The University of Michigan and President of Liker Lean Advisors, LLC. He is the author of the best-selling book, The Toyota Way, Second Edition, and has coauthored nine other books about Toyota including The Toyota Way to Service Excellence and The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership. His graphic novel with Eduardo Lander and Tom Root tells the story of lean transformation at a mail-order company: Lean in a High-Variability Business. A more compact graphic novel, Engaging the Team at Zingerman’s Mail Order, illustrates how Kata unleashed the creativity of their team. His articles and books have won thirteen Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence. He was inducted into the Association of Manufacturing Excellence Hall of Fame and the Shingo Academy.

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Michael Bungay Stanier has a gift for distilling big, complex ideas into practical, accessible knowledge for everyday people that helps them be a force for good.

His books have sold over a million copies, with The Coaching Habit topping the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. MBS has been featured on the blogs and social media platforms of thought leaders including Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, and Brené Brown, and has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBC, Ted.com, and innumerable podcasts―as well as in notable publications including the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Inc., and Fast Company.

MBS is the founder of Box of Crayons, a learning and development company, that helps organizations move from advice-driven action to curiosity-led transformation. They have trained more than half a million people for clients including Microsoft, Salesforce, TELUS and Gucci.

Before establishing Box of Crayons, MBS’s accomplishments included publishing an academic article on James Joyce and a Harlequin-esque short story; playing small roles in helping invent Pizza Hut’s Stuffed Crust pizza and creating “one of the worst single-malt whiskies in existence”; and spending 20 minutes writing what has remained GlaxoSmithKline’s global vision for more than 20 years.

A former Rhodes Scholar, MBS is an Australian who now lives in Toronto, Canada.

You can join others committed to being a force for change at MBS.works

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Matt Abrahams is the Larsen Lam Family Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and a much sought-after keynote speaker and communication consultant for Fortune 100 companies.  His popular podcast, Think Fast, Talk Smart, is the number one career/business program on Apple Podcasts in India, Israel, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore, and in the top five in the US and the UK, with 1.1 million average downloads/listens per month. His TEDx talks have racked up over six million views. Think Faster, Talk Smarter is his first book.

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Dr. Steven J. Spear (DBA MS MS)

Principal, HVE LLC

Sr. Lecturer, MIT Sloan School

Sr. Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Creator, See to Solve Gemba and Real Time Alert Systems

[email protected] www.SeeToSolve.com [email protected]

Knowing how to get smarter about what you do and better at doing it, faster than

anyone else, is critical, a bona fide source of sustainable competitive advantage.

How so? All organizations share a challenge. They’re trying to coordinate people—

sometimes a few, sometimes many thousands—towards shared purpose, somewhere

on the spectrum from upstream conceptualization and discovery, through

development, design, and ultimately delivery. The problem is, particularly at the start

of any undertaking, no one really knows what to do, how to do it, nor can they do it

well. All that has to be invented, created, discovered…figured out.

So, those who solve problems faster, win more. After all, if your team and mine chase similar goals (or we face

off as adversaries), you succeed (or win) because you come to your moments of test better prepared than I do.

Since knowhow and skills are not innate, you won because you solved your problems, better and faster than I did

mine, gaining edges in relevance, reliability, resilience, and agility.

Spear’s work focuses on the theme of leading complex collaborative situations, imbuing them with powerful

problem solving dynamics. The High Velocity Edge earned the Crosby Medal from ASQ. “Fixing Healthcare from

the Inside” won a Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award, and five of Spear’s articles won Shingo Prizes.

“Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” is a leading HBR reprint and part of the “lean” canon. He’s

written for medical professionals and educators in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, and Health

Services Research, for public school superintendents in Academic Administrator, and for the general public in the

New York Times, the Boston Globe, Fortune, and USA Today.

High velocity learning concepts have been tested in practice, helping building internal capability for accelerated

improvement and innovation at Alcoa—which generated recurring savings in the $100s of millions, Beth Israel

Deaconess, a pharma company—with compressions by half in a key drug development phase, Intel, Intuit,

Pittsburgh hospitals, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Mass General, Novartis, Pratt and Whitney—which won the F-35

engine contract with its pilot, DTE Energy, US Synthetic, and the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force. The Chief of

Naval Operations made high velocity learning a service wide initiative, and Spear was one of a few outside advisors

to the Navy’s internal review of 2017’s Pacific collisions. He was also an advisor to Newport News Shipbuilding

bout introducing innovative systems on the Gerald Ford, the first in a new generation of aircraft carriers. The See

to Solve suite of apps has been developed to support introducing and sustaining high velocity learning behaviors.

At MIT, Spear teaches Leaders for Global Operations and Executive Education students, has advised dozens of

theses, and is principal investigator for research titled “Making Critical Decisions with Hostile Data.” Spear’s work

history includes Prudential-Bache Capital Funding, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, the LongTerm Credit Bank of Japan, and the University of Tokyo. His doctorate is from Harvard, his masters in mechanicalengineering and in management are from MIT, and he majored in economics, at Princeton, to earn his bachelors.

Spear lives in Brookline with his wife Miriam, an architect, and their three children, where he is on the board of

the Maimonides School.

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Dave Gutscher is a Management Consultant that specializes on improving the management process.

Dave has 40 years of work experience in agriculture, fresh food, automotive and finance. He is a certified ‘Problem Solving’ trainer and has over 25 years direct experience with Toyota in both Canada and the United States. He has been applying and teaching the ‘Toyota Production System’ concepts for more than 35 years, including ‘8 Step Problem Solving.’ His experience covers Manufacturing, Engineering, Business Planning, Organizational Development, Logistics, Human Resources, Environmental, Safety, Sales, and Finance at all functional levels within the organization from laborer to Senior Executive. As a consultant Dave supports businesses of all sizes, complexity and business types including Manufacturing, Retail, Sales, Finance and Healthcare.

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Jeremy Utley is one of the world's leading experts in innovation. Formerly the Director of Executive Education at Stanford's renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka "the d.school"), and now as an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, his courses have been experienced by nearly a million students of innovation worldwide. He advises corporate leaders on how to imbed the methods and mindsets of design thinking into their organizations and works with professionals to cultivate a robust personal creative practice.

As co-founder and host of "Stanford's Masters of Creativity," Jeremy shone the spotlight on exemplars of creative practice across disciplinary boundaries, from entrepreneurs like Randy Hetrick (TRX) to authors like Kim Scott (Radical Candor) and Daniel Pink (Drive, To Sell Is Human).

He now hosts the "Paint & Pipette Podcast," which celebrates female founders (season 1), black creators (season 2). Season three -- currently in production -- features corporate innovation leaders like Astro Teller (Google X), Kevin Kelly (WIRED), and Ed Catmull (Pixar), authors like Seth Godin (Purple Cow, Linchpin), Liz Wiseman (Multipliers) and Rita McGrath (Seeing Around Corners), and entrepreneurs like Liz Tran, Marcus Whitney, and Jason Mayden.

A self-proclaimed “recovering MBA, spreadsheet junkie, and management consultant,” he now studies innovation in large enterprises and startups. He advises CEOs and senior leadership teams in the United States, Europe, and Asia on growth and innovation strategy, and has led scores of capacity-building initiatives worldwide.

His current research explores the intersection of generative AI, enterprise innovation, collaboration, and creativity.

He's a prolific blogger and co-author (alongside Perry Klebahn) of “Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters,” published by Penguin Portfolio Oct 25th, 2022.

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Sarah Sydlowski, AuD, PhD, MBA is Audiology Director of the Hearing Implant Program and Associate Chief Improvement Officer at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Sydlowski is Board Certified in Audiology with Specialty Certification in Cochlear Implants. Her clinical and research interests focus on implantable hearing devices, optimization of practice efficiency while maintaining strong outcomes, and development of innovative clinical delivery models. She has earned the Cleveland Clinic Distinguished Educator Certificate and is adjunct faculty at the University of Akron where she teaches the graduate Implantable Technologies course.

Dr. Sydlowski completed her clinical doctorate at the University of Louisville, her externship at Mayo Clinic Arizona, and her PhD at Gallaudet University. Most recently, she completed her executive MBA at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University where she was the recipient of the EMBA Leadership Award.

Dr. Sydlowski has been very active in professional organizations, serving on the American Academy of Audiology Board of Directors as a member-at-large (2015-2018) and currently as Immediate Past President. She is a past president of the Ohio Academy of Audiology and was Co-Chair of the American Cochlear Implant Alliance Program Committee in 2021. She is currently Co-Chair of the Hearing Health Collaborative, a think tank of audiologists, otologists, and patient advocates charged with developing a blueprint for changing the landscape of hearing healthcare. She is also principal investigator of a study focused on integration of tablet-based hearing screeners in primary care and geriatric medicine practices. Together with her physician co-investigators, Dr. Sydlowski aims to quantify the feasibility and impact of prioritizing the identification and management of hearing loss with referring providers.

In her role as Associate Chief Improvement Officer, Dr. Sydlowski works closely with CI specialists across the organization to develop a culture of improvement where every caregiver is capable, expected, and empowered to make improvements every day.

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 Mark Graban is an author, speaker, and consultant, whose latest book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation, is available now.

He is also the author of the award-winning book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement and others, including Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More.

He serves as a consultant through his company, Constancy, Inc, and is also a Senior Advisor for the technology company KaiNexus. Mark hosts podcasts, including “Lean Blog Interviews” and “My Favorite Mistake.”

Education: B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University; M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and M.B.A. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Leaders for Global Operations Program.

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Chris Butterworth is a multi-award-winning author, speaker, and coach. He is a certified Shingo Institute master-level facilitator and a Shingo Institute Faculty Fellow and examiner. He is the winner of Best New Speaker of the Year Award for The Executive Connection (TEC) for his talk on Lean Thinking and the co-author of the widely acclaimed Shingo publication award winning books 4+1: Embedding a Culture of Continuous Improvement and The Essence of Excellence and is also the editor of the Shingo Institute book Enterprise Alignment and Results.

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Dan Fleming is the Director of Consulting Services at GBMP and has an impressive 30+ years of experience in operations and engineering, including 25 years of hands-on practice devoted to the principles and tools of the Toyota Production System and Continuous Improvement. Dan has been a Shingo Prize Examiner and Shingo Course Facilitator for 10 years. He played key role in developing GBMP’s Lean Healthcare Certificate Course, which has been highly praised and taken by over 1000 individuals from various medical institutions. Dan is a Shingo Prize Recipient and Lean Silver Certified and regularly speaks at regional, national, and international conferences. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Northeastern University, as well as 20 years as a Continuous Improvement Manager at GBMP. Dan’s broad industry knowledge includes manufacturing, healthcare, and service organizations. With his exceptional career achievements and expertise, Dan is a highly sought-after speaker in the CI sector.

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