Returning to the podcast for Episode #358 is Steve Spear, a senior lecturer at MIT and author of the book The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition. He’s also the founder and co-creator of…
I hope you’re a regular listener to my Lean Blog Podcast series, where I’ve interviewed authors and Lean leaders since 2006. I’ve been doing podcasts so long that they were trendy, then out of style, and now they’ve been fashionable…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #500 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is me, your usual host Mark Graban. Today, I’m mixing up the format with a solo episode that celebrates 500…
My guests for Episode #493 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Gene Kim and Steve Spear, co-authors of “Wiring the Winning Organization.” We talk about why so many organizations copy the visible practices of Toyota or Amazon — two…
TODAY marks the 17th birthday (or is it an anniversary?) of my Lean Blog Interviews podcast (known in the early days as the LeanBlog Podcast). It’s an awkward name and part of me wishes I had chosen something with more…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more During our summer hiatus from releasing new podcast episodes, we’re looking back at previous episodes of the podcast. Today, sadly, we’re taking a look back at guests from the past 15…
Steve Spear shares lessons from Hajime Oba, who founded Toyota’s Supplier Support Center (TSSC) and became one of the most influential teachers of the Toyota Production System in North America. In this episode, Spear describes how Mr. Oba looked at…
Joining me for Episode #352 of the podcast is Frederick Southwick, M.D. He is a Professor of Medicine and is also Director of Patient Care Quality and Safety in the Division of Hospitalist Medicine at the University of Florida in…
Previous Episodes (Full List): Click to visually browse episodes For easy access to any Podcast, use the forwarding URL: leanblog.org/X where X is the episode number. This text list is from the old version of the podcast’s main blog page.…
My guest for Episode #262 is Steven J. Spear (@stevenjspear on Twitter). He is author of the fantastic book The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition. He’s a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School…
Editor’s note (2026): In an era of AI, dashboards, and real-time data, Spear’s reminder still holds: information only matters if it changes behavior. TL;DR: Steve Spear argues that organizations deliver quality and value faster not by working harder, but by…
My guest for episode #206 is Ed Pound, co-author of the book Factory Physics for Managers: How Leaders Improve Performance in a Post-Lean Six Sigma World that was released in April. It is, of course, a new version of the original Factory…
