The Management Brief — January Summary
In January, The Management Brief examined the complex relationship of strategic direction and meaningful execution from different perspectives. Most of the executives that participated this past month...
View ArticleManaging on Purpose Excerpt
In The Management Brief this week, LEI is pleased to share an excerpt from Managing on Purpose: Using hoshin kanri to develop strategy, align teams, grow leaders, and innovate your enterprise. In his...
View ArticleIsao Yoshino Reflects on 40 Years at Toyota
In this edition of The Management Brief, Mark Reich sits down with Isao Yoshino, a 40-year veteran of Toyota and a driving force behind the company’s success with hoshin kanri. Yoshino shares the...
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Building Ownership: Insights from O.C. Tanner
A few months ago, we spent several days together at Tyson’s company, O.C. Tanner, which is renowned for its high levels of continuous improvement activities and employee engagement. Lean practitioners...
View Article30-Plus Years with Hoshin Kanri
This week The Management Brief presents a podcast with Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer, Strategy. They discuss Mark’s 30-plus years working with hoshin kanri — two...
View ArticleLean Summit Deep Dive into Hoshin Kanri
At LEI’s Lean Summit 2025 yesterday in Atlanta, Mark Reich delivered a keynote presentation during which he discussed the role of hoshin kanri throughout his career, first while working at Toyota for...
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Developing More than a Machine: How an MIT D-Lab Project for Tanzanian...
Be among the first to get the latest insights from LEI’s Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD) thought leaders and practitioners. This podcast was delivered to subscribers of The Design Brief,...
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Hoshin Kanri as a Foundational Piece of a Lean Management System
It may seem surprising that about 60 years since Toyota and a few other companies first introduced hoshin kanri there is still a need to write about what may seem to be its basics. Those of us who see...
View ArticleSocially Responsible Design Meets Lean Product and Process Development: A...
In this episode of WLEI Podcast, we welcome Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and author of Design for the Other 90%. Cynthia speaks...
View ArticleManaging Amid Chaos
We’ve heard from many leaders at Lean Summit 2025 and in the weeks leading up to the event that the annual plans they put in place for their organizations are already needing significant rework. Not...
View ArticleEngineering for the Future: A Conversation with MIT D-Lab Founder Amy Smith
In this episode of WLEI Podcast, we welcome Amy Smith, Founding Director of MIT’s D-Lab, an innovative university-based program in international development and a senior lecturer in Mechanical...
View ArticleThree Faces of Lean Management
The Machine that Changed the World ushered in a new era when it proclaimed that “lean production” was the future and companies needed to commit or be run out of business by competitors that do. Then we...
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Engineering Education with Impact: Developing Problem-Solvers and Making...
Imagine that the surgeon had sat around in medical school discussing heart surgery cases, watching heart-surgery videos, and listening to great heart surgeons talk about what they did—and now you are...
View ArticleStarting a Lean Transformation: Building a Team of ACEs
Lean transformations don’t happen by accident—or by hiring a consultant to drop a playbook and walk away. At a newer Midwest manufacturing plant with which we’ve been partnering, we’ve seen firsthand...
View ArticleWant to Improve Your Product Development? Prioritize Organizational Learning
A few days ago, I heard a sportscaster exclaim that only three players on the team for the upcoming year were with the team five years ago. As I pondered the fact that out of 88 players only three had...
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Solving the Productivity Paradox
Years ago, when I worked in the tech sector, vendors that sold technology to major corporations equipped their salesforces with ROI calculators. These were essentially spreadsheets that collected...
View ArticleWhat it Takes to Win at New Product Development: A Conversation with Steve Spear
In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Steve Spear, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, senior fellow at the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, and associated faculty...
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