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Toyota’s Investment in AI Capability
Toyota's AI strategy isn't a platform purchase. It's a bet on its own people. Inside the training, certification, and shop-floor…
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Better Thinking Faster: Toyota Problem-Solving Secrets
Josh Howell, Mark Reich, and Art Smalley reveal the Toyota traits that help everyone from frontline to executives solve problems…
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Sebastian Fixson and Jim Morgan on Why Human Judgment will be Essential for Product Development in the Age of AI
Jim Morgan and Sebastian Fixson on why human judgment stays essential to product development as generative AI reshapes how engineering…
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Prompting for Problem Solving
Prompting an AI for problem solving is really job instruction work. Art Smalley and Tyson Heaton show how lean thinking…
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Peter Ward: Lean’s Bridge between Business and Academia
Peter Ward built lean's bridge between business and academia. As he steps down from the LEI board, colleagues reflect on…
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Better Thinking Faster: A conversation about solving problems just in time
Art Smalley, Josh Howell, and Mark Reich on why problem-solving speed depends on organizational level, problem type, and the thinking…
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Past, Present, and Future of Lean and AI
Gene Kim and Art Smalley join Tyson Heaton to discuss how AI is reshaping lean practice, from surfacing hidden value…
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Leaning into Lean at Summit Polymers
How Summit Polymers used jidoka, standardized work, and kaizen to survive tariffs, COVID, and labor shortages since 2019.
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Coaching and Co-Learning — Leading Lean without Authority
In the final Starbucks coaching installment, Scott Heydon, John Shook, and Josh Howell examine what leading lean without direct authority…
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Sharing Inspiration and Learning with Lean “Cohorts”
LEI's weekly feature series has surfaced lean stories across seven practitioner cohorts — from executives and product engineers to healthcare…
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Who Thrives in the AI Workforce?
AI panels predict a new cognitive elite. Art Smalley asks the question they missed: how do organizations develop everyone to…
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The Next Value Stream: What Lean Can Learn from the Internet
Applying AI to broken workflows just makes them faster at failing. Steve Pereira argues that lean organizations must redesign their…
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