Remastered January 2022

Episode page: https://www.leanblog.org/228

Labor Day is Monday, so maybe it's appropriate that my guest for episode #228 of the podcast is Zeynep Ton, an Adjunct Associate Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. You may have recently seen her being interviewed by Fareed Zakaria on CNN. Read her full bio here.

She is author of the 2014 book The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits.

I saw Ton give a lecture at an MIT alumni event back in June and immediately bought and read the book (read my blog post about the book and parallels to Lean and healthcare). I highly recommend it and I wish more hospitals and health systems would pursue this “good jobs strategy” instead of being so focused on cutting labor costs. As Ton explains in the book and our discussion, this strategy is not about being kind or nice — it's just good business that drives better long-term results for all.

In the podcast, we talk about:

• How she transitioned from industrial engineering and supply chain management to studying retail companies.