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avatar for Steven Spear

Steven Spear

Steven J. Spear is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. His book, The High Velocity Edge, has won numerous awards including the Philip Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) in 2011. Spear is an internationally recognized expert about leadership, innovation, and operational excellence, and he is an authority on how select companies – in high tech and heavy industry, design and production, manufacturing and services – generate unmatchable performance by converting improvement and innovation from the rare kiss of inspiration to repeatable, broad-based, skill-based disciplines. Spear’s research has been exceptionally well acknowledged with five Shingo Prizes and a McKinsey award from Harvard Business Review. At MIT, Spear teaches in the Leaders for Global Operations program and in Sloan School executive education. His clients have included well-known corporations like Intel, Lockheed Martin, Intuit, Novelis, Alcoa, United Technologies, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Among other accomplishments, Spear helped the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative create its ‘Perfecting Patient Care System.’ That has been credited with eliminating horrible complications like central line infections and thereby improving care quality while reducing cost. The Alcoa Business System, which he helped design and launch, is regularly credited with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings. Other clients have dramatically compressed time and cost for marketing processes, new product development and software design.