star player

1. •As a star player, the sensei is master of lean technique. taktX sensei cover all lean subject matter areas in all business functions, including product development, and in all industries, including healthcare. Our star player consulting format follows the 5-day kaizen blitz model, originally developed to promote long-term cultural change. In problematic situations, we conduct 3-day workouts. In turnaround situations we take charge through strategic action teams (S.W.A.T.)

master teacher

1. •As a master teacher, the sensei is an advocate of the Socratic method, because every person must discover her own genius for discipline and problem solving, teaching, and coaching. Coaching can be defined as working with someone to demonstrate the meaning of an idea or the way in which something is done.

head coach

1. •Coaching is a helping process by which the sensei cultivates being lean, that is, seeing the right thing to do, feeling that it is right, and doing it naturally as a part of daily work. The sensei coaches lean leaders to be coaches in their own right, who help others to see, feel, and behave so as to ensure adherence to effective standards, to remember standards when they are forgotten, to improve standards that are ineffective, or to invent new standards to control unexpected outcomes for which no standard practices or conditions are specified.

To implement the Toyota Management Systems in healthcare, we must teach you “how to fish.” In other words, we must transfer the technology or methods of lean healthcare to your managers, providers, and staff. The first order of business is to educate and train a core group of executives and managers who employ lean methods to create “model lines” or clinical value streams that will be replicated throughout your organization. This is job of the Kaizen Promotion Office, which reports to your CEO. Members of the KPO and managers must pass through a rigorous course of instruction to achieve their certifications.

To sustain the gains of lean technology transfer, you must develop a new generation of servant leaders who can fish and teach others how to fish. Leadership development takes place in the context of hoshin kanri and the A3 process. For an overview of the process, please refer to Rona Consulting Group partner Tom Jackson’s Shingo Prize-winning book, Hoshin kanri for the lean enterprise (Productivity Press, 2006). Also see John Shook’s Managing to Learn (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2008), in which he describes the role that the A3 process played in his education as a manager at Toyota. Another excellent source of information about leadership development at Toyota is Steve Spears “Learning to lead at Toyota,” Harvard Business Review, May 2004.