A select few organizations dominate their competition on every conceivable measure: time to market, quality, system reliability, security, and so forth. They do so by creating and sustaining a pace and breadth of internally generated improvement and innovation, that rivals cannot keep up. Examples span design and operation: including Pratt and Whitney--which compressed from 4 years to 3 jet-engine design cycle time while halving engineering change orders, a micro-chip fab which cut by half its throughput time while increasing capacity, improving quality and yield--leading to a per unit cost cut of 35%, and the US Navy's nuclear propulsion program which has operated since 1954 without any reactor related injury or environmental contamination. By the end of the session, attendees will have a view to how market beating performance can be achieved by:
-- designing processes and systems so problems can be seen when and where they occur.
-- solving problems at the time and place detected to build new useful knowledge
-- sharing new found knowledge for systemic incorporation
-- leading an organization capable of relentless learning and adaptation.
Steven Spear, Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Engineering Systems Division, is an internationally recognized expert about leadership, innovation, and operational excellence, with particular emphasis on how select companies convert improvement and innovation from the rare kiss of inspiration to repeatable, broad-based, skill-based disciplines. He is an award winning author of The High Velocity Edge and articles that have appeared in Harvard Business Review, the NYTimes, the Boston Globe, Annals of Internal Medicine, and elsewhere. He has worked with companies as diverse as Alcoa, Intel, Intuit, Lockheed Martin, is on the board of a medical IT company, Aceso, and is founder of another IT company, See-to-Solve.
