Michael Ballé, PhD, is a lean management practitioner, business writer, and author. His most recent book, co-authored with father Freddy Ballé, is Lead With Respect: A Novel of Lean Practice, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute.

They're co-authors of two earlier Shingo Research Award-winning business novels about lean management. The Gold Mine tells how lean concepts turn around a failing plant. The Lean Manage describes the conversion to a complete lean business system. Michael also writes the Gemba Coach column at https://www.lean.org/balle

For the past 20+ years, he has studied first-hand lean transformations, helping companies and people in fields such as manufacturing, engineering, construction, services, and healthcare make the transition to different ways of working and managing.

As a managing partner of ESG Consultants, Ballé coaches executives on how to obtain exceptional performance through lean tools, principles, and different management attitudes. His main coaching technique is the "real place visit," where he helps senior executives learn how to really see their own shop floors, teach people the spirit of kaizen, and reach the right conclusions for the whole business.

An engaging and colorful public speaker, Ballé also is an experienced workshop facilitator, an associate researcher at Télécom ParisTech's Projet Lean Enterprise, and co-founder of the French Lean Institute. Ballé holds a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Social Sciences and Knowledge Sciences. He is co-founder of the Project Lean Entreprise and the Instituet Lean France.

Tom Ehrenfeld is a writer and editor living in Cambridge, MA. A former writer/editor with Inc. Magazine and Harvard Business Review, he is the author of The Startup Garden: How Growing A Business Grows You. He works as a consulting editor for LEI and with many other lean authors. Seven of his edited books have won the Shingo Research Award.