Purpose & Principles Podcast

Listen in with Dr. Matt Pollard and Scott Saxton, two of the leaders of continuous improvement at Intermountain Healthcare. This journey has brought incredible and meaningful results along the way. Hear the stories and be inspired!

Dr. Pollard is the Vice President of Continuous Improvement at Intermountain Healthcare. His passion is engaging leaders, physicians and caregiver teams in improving healthcare and patient outcomes through Continuous Improvement. He has trained many healthcare providers in the use of Continuous Improvement and has presented at multiple national conferences and healthcare organizations across the country.

Scott has been involved with Lean and Continuous Improvement efforts for 27 years. He left manufacturing (after 23 years at Autoliv) and 9 years ago he began applying Lean in Healthcare by accepting a position as Northern Region Continuous Improvement Director for Intermountain Healthcare.  This started as a Pilot only in the North region.  With the success of implementing Lean in the North, top leadership at Intermountain Healthcare chose to adopt the Continuous Improvement Model (Lean) at a system level.   Since then Scott has been asked to work at a system level, responsible for supporting Intermountain Senior leaders over hospitals, clinical services and Clinics as the Assistant Vice President of Continuous Improvement. 

Intermountain has seen over 250K thousand implemented ideas from their employees, millions of dollars in cost savings and significant improvement in Quality metrics.  The adoption and practice of the Intermountain Operating Model is credited from Intermountain’s Senior Leadership as the reason for improved results as they own and drive accountability.

Scott Miller serves as a consultant and advisor after spending twenty-four years with FranklinCovey Co., as the Executive Vice President of Thought Leadership. Here, we talk about his new book: "Master Mentors," and what he learned from so many great people along the way. 

He is the host of the FranklinCovey sponsored On Leadership With Scott Miller, a weekly leadership webcast, podcast, and newsletter that features interviews with renowned business titans, authors, and thought leaders and is distributed to more than six million business leaders worldwide. He was the host of the weekly radio program Great Life, Great Career With Scott Miller on iHeartMedia’s KNRS 105.9. This radio program and podcast provide insight and strategies drawn from FranklinCovey’s leadership principles and from Miller’s career and personal life experience to assist listeners in becoming more effective as business leaders and to improve their personal performance. Additionally, Miller authors a weekly leadership column for Inc. Magazine.

Bryan Crowell is the COO at Peterson, Inc. Previously, he was a senior leader of the continuous improvement work at Intermountain Healthcare, the VP of Operations for ATK Armament Systems Group, headquartered in Clearfield Utah, and a former plant manager at Autoliv Airbag Module Plant in Ogden Utah. Bryan has had the opportunity to lead multiple organization through cultural transformation.  With the combination of structure, processes and leadership behaviors Bryan has demonstrated the ability to engage all team members to drive results. Employees under Bryan’s leadership and processes have  implemented over 500K ideas being recognized as world class throughout industry. Mr. Crowell had the opportunity to set up the first model TPS area at the inflator facility for Autoliv, under the tutelage of Harada-san from Toyota for three years.  He received a Bachelor in Physics from WSU, and an MBA from Utah State.

Stephen M. R. Covey is a New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The SPEED of Trust—The One Thing That Changes Everything. He is the former CEO of Covey Leadership Center, which, under his stewardship, became the largest leadership development company in the world. Stephen personally led the strategy that propelled his father’s book, Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to become one of the two most influential business books of the 20th Century, according to CEO Magazine.

As President and CEO of Covey Leadership Center, Stephen nearly doubled revenues while increasing profits by 12 times. During that period, the company expanded throughout the world into over 40 countries, greatly increasing the value of the brand and enterprise. The company was valued at $2.4 million when Stephen was named CEO, and, within three years, he had grown shareholder value to $160 million in a merger he orchestrated with Franklin Quest to form FranklinCovey.

Stephen co-founded CoveyLink, a consulting practice, which focuses on enabling leaders and organizations to increase and leverage trust to achieve superior performance.

Stephen recently merged CoveyLink with FranklinCovey, forming the Global Speed of Trust Practice, where Stephen serves as Global Practice Leader.

I was leading a state agency in Salt Lake City during the economic crisis. The worse the economy got, the more citizens came to us looking for help.  And the economy was getting worse by the day.

Caseloads were up by 60 percent. Common sense would say I needed to hire 60 percent more employees and lease the office space to house them. But that was out of the question. We all knew what was coming: budget cuts.

My team was stressed out, overworked, and worried. Truth-be-told, so was I.

I started trying different approaches--knowing there had to be a better way.  Most failed.  One showed promise, but it clearly wasn't going to work out of the shrink wrap--it was built for business and industry.  It would need to be modified to work in government.

So, that's what my team and I did.  We tweaked, experimented, failed, learned, and then...we figured it out.  

We were not only able to meet the unprecedented demand, but improve quality, and we returned $30 million back to the General Fund--we didn't need it. Morale was restored. We were a team again knowing we just pulled off a huge accomplishment against all odds.  

Soon after, the Governor made me executive director over an agency that would oversee the state's $20 billion budget and all of the executive branch's operations. Together, we set an ambitious target to improve all of state government by 25 percent.  

We improved by 35 percent.

I started sharing our story online.   We organized the biggest conference of its kind in the world, and I co-authored two books.  I've now applied this in over 200 systems in a huge variety of settings.  

It works.  

Roger L. Martin is Professor Emeritus at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto, where he served as Dean from 1998 to 2013, and as Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute from 2013 to 2019. In 2013, he was named Global Dean of the Year and in 2017, he was named the world's #1 management thinker. He has published 11 previous books including, most recently, Creating Great Choices with Jennifer Riel; Getting Beyond

Better with Sally Osberg; and Playing to Win with A.G. Lafley, which won the

award for Best Book of 2012–13 by Thinkers50. He has written 28 Harvard Business Review articles. Martin is a trusted strategy advisor to the CEOs of many global companies and originally hails from Ontario, Canada.

Michael and Katie Stallard are partners of E Pluribus Partners and the Connection Culture Group, leadership training and consulting firms based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Their clients have included Costco, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NASA Johnson Space Center, Qualcomm, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Treasury Department, Turner Construction and Yale-New Haven Health. Texas Christian University founded the TCU Center for Connection Culture based their work.

Michael and Katie are coauthors of Connection Culture and Michael is the primary author of Fired Up or Burned Out.

Jared Spataro is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. This conversation starts fast and is packed full of insights and research that Microsoft is reviewing as they design for the future. Here, we specifically look at how we humanize the workplace of the future.

In his current role, Jared is responsible for Microsoft 365, including business management, product and partner marketing, and go-to-market programs. He joined Microsoft in 2006 and has focused on productivity in various marketing, product management, and business roles at the company over the last 13 years. Prior to Microsoft, Jared worked in a number of small- and mid-sized technology companies in a variety of roles, including engineering, product management, product marketing, business management, and sales.

Listen in as serial entrepreneur, David Taylor-Klaus and I talk about coaching and mindsets.

David brings decades of experience to his current professional playground at DTK Coaching, where he’s spent a dozen years coaching successful entrepreneurs and senior executives. Through coaching, David’s clients uplevel from leadership competency to leadership mastery. The result: dramatic shifts in their performance and career trajectories and in personal fulfillment. Understanding that a powerful leader exists in each of us, David empowers his clients — both individuals and teams — to unearth and unleash their leadership potential and take an active, intentional, and dynamic role in their professional and personal lives.

Over three decades, focused on senior executives and the teams they lead, David has coached or consulted with thousands of companies spanning the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors.

An addictive life-long learner, David holds a wide array of professional certifications: Professional Certified Coach (PCC) from the International Coach Federation, Certified Professional Co-active™ Coach (CPCC); Certified Team Performance Coach™ (one of the first); and a Certified Conversational Intelligence® (C-IQ) Coach. He is a 15-year member of Vistage International as well as a Vistage Speaker.

Driven by a passion for growth and creativity, David’s personal and professional worlds clearly reflect a journey in pursuit of excellence, always with a great deal of humor and heart. Known for his sharp intellect and incisive ability to see and say what others do not, David balances fierce candor with genuine compassion. Recent empty-nesters, David and his wife live in the heart of Atlanta with their dogs.