Peter Ward has been a lean pioneer in the academic world at The Ohio State University, recognizing long before others the need for lean curriculum on college campuses. When Peter steps away from the LEI Board of Directors on July 21, he’s leaving a professional and personal hole that won’t easily be filled. He also leaves fond memories for those fortunate to have crossed his path in business, academia, and at LEI.
Those who worked with Peter describe a rare temperament. Jim Womack, LEI Founder and Senior Advisor, calls him “our emotional heijunka,” a balanced, level presence who never got too high or low and brought the perspective that things were never as good or bad as they seemed. “He also was our jidoka, because he was out looking for things that were going off the rails,” focus on the “red” and doing whatever he could to bring attention to it and then offer support. “Peter was trying to enable good work by calling out issues, by supplying things that were needed when they were needed, by leveling and trying to create some basic stability. You can think of Peter as a one-man Toyota house, resting on basic stability and heijunka.”
Jim recalls that Peter was “the most promising bridge to the academic world that we had” when they met decades ago. Peter had business experiences prior to academia — Wang Laboratories and the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and understood lean thinking and practices from a business perspective and then could write about it in ways that academics could understand. His research at OSU examined the impact of lean on performance and helped to make lean “legitimate to academics who need numbers and data and have to be able to regress and so forth,” says Jim. “He could do that, and that, by the way, was quite consistent with his career path. He wasn’t doing something that he wouldn’t have otherwise done. In fact, that’s what the academic was supposed to do.”
“He is a bridge between traditional management and academia and lean management,” says Tom Paider, LEI Chairman of the Board. “There are a lot of people who understand one or the other and those who kind of think they understand the other side, whereas Peter really does.”
The lean bridge between business and academia was fortified with the Master of Business Operational Excellence (MBOE) program at the Fisher College of Business at OSU, a degree program aimed at mid-career professionals involved in transforming organizations through lean thinking and practice. Peter was the founding director, and the program was innovative when created in 2008-09 and remains one of the only programs of its kind today. “People desperately want these credentials,” says Jim, and the MBOE legitimized lean with academia. “That was a very useful thing because it was hard to keep the ‘B-School’ guys focused if there wasn’t some sort of a degree program tied to it.”
Peg Pennington, President of MoreSteam and an LEI board member, had the opportunity to work with Peter on a lean class he started at OSU prior to the MBOE, and then worked with him on the 18-month “journey” to create the program, getting approval from the business college, all universities in Ohio, the Board of Trustees, and the Board of Regents. She says the program did not encounter any pushback, in part because of Peter’s writing abilities and because “he really understood the need for the program and was able to explain it such that there was nobody from healthcare or other universities that questioned the need for that program.”
“That was very innovative what we did at Ohio State because nobody else had a program like that,” adds Peg. “He was always willing to try new things, new ways of working partnerships across the university, whether it was with healthcare or engineering. That really sticks out in my mind, how collegial he was and … seeing things and willing to experiment and reach across the table. Just an amazing leader and a great colleague.”
The MBOE has, at its core, been unique in that executives attending have to work on and solve real problems at their organizations. “The idea that we’re going to work with them and that they’re going to have a coach; those models in the university are hard to do,” says Peg.
Tom met Peter when he went through the MBOE program and says, “He’s kind of a quiet force, if you think about it. He is a bit behind the scenes, but his impact can’t possibly be overstated in the lean movement over the last series of decades, if you think about starting up the first postgraduate master’s degree program in lean with the MBOE and creation of the Center for Operational Excellence.”
Peter has been the Academic Director of the Center for Operational Excellence (COE) at OSU, a consortium of approximately 40 organizations dedicated to excellence and thought leadership in operations. He also founded the Lean Education Academic Network, a global community of university educators dedicated to teaching systems thinking in universities, and is Professor Emeritus of Operations Management and the Richard M. Ross Emeritus Chair in Management at Fisher College of Business.
The MBOE has educated approximately 25 people each year since 2009, “so that’s a lot of lives that he’s impacted, and that doesn’t include his PhD students and other students that he taught at Ohio State,” says Peg.
“That’s a pretty impressive legacy,” says Josh Howell, LEI President. “A lot of the people who have run through that MBOE program have been in pretty significant roles, very influential within their organizations. Just imagine the number of companies that have been affected by the curriculum he designed and helped deliver and the people who’ve gone through that program. I think it’s also served as at least a reference point, if not a model, for other universities to study and emulate.”
Josh gets calls from universities wanting to establish similar programs, and he’s ready to send them to OSU but in most cases the inquiring university is already familiar with and trying to mirror the MBOE. “I think that to establish, arguably, the most prominent graduate-level lean program in the U.S. is a pretty singular contribution.” Executives are getting theory and the academic credibility, but they’re also coming out having worked on something meaningful for their businesses and their careers, adds Josh.
The MBOE connected businesses to academia; Peter’s research work brought the stamp of academic rigor to the understanding of lean’s influence on business. Peter coauthored “Lean Manufacturing: Context, Practice Bundles and Performance” with Rachna Shah, LEI board member and professor at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. The paper was published in the Journal of Operations Management and received the Shingo Award for Research in 2003. It was groundbreaking in that it statistically showed the impact of lean manufacturing practices on business outcomes. In 2007 Rachna and Peter coauthored “Defining and Developing Measures of Lean Production,” which also was published in the Journal of Operations Management and examined the semantic confusion around the term “lean production.”
In 2010, Peter was asked to join the LEI Board of Directors and was Chairman from 2020 to 2025. His appointment to Chairman at LEI closely followed Josh becoming President. “That was really my first opportunity to get to know Peter, get to work closely with Peter, and he always had such a steady hand,” says Josh. “Him having been around the institute for a long time, been around lean and lean education for a really long time, I couldn’t have asked for a better first Chair in this capacity than somebody like Peter.”
Peter frequently sat quietly in board meetings, following the discussion, patiently waiting to comment at the end; he was never in a rush, says Josh. “He was always at this very steady pace, which I found really reassuring. I’d be freaking out about something, feeling like we need to figure out how to fix this now, and he would never echo that frantic energy. So it would give someone like me — untested, inexperienced in some things — a sense of ‘Oh, I can relax. I’ve got time.’…He’s just patiently, calmly advising me through this thing. That’s pretty unique.”
“There’s probably been nobody that’s been more impactful on my professional life than Peter,” says Tom. “When he leaves the board, he may not know this, but he’s going to get a call from me at least once a month just to run things by him.”
Peter was Rachna’s PhD advisor at OSU, and at the time he was bringing lean leaders to speak at OSU. She recalls the opportunities this created for her and others to hear about the real-world challenges that lean was trying to address and the need for research to prove this out. She says her many discussions with Peter during that time and still today have had a great influence on how she interacts with and mentors others.
Rachna says Peter should be known for “the amazing mentorship he gave to every student,” the institutional developments at OSU (the MBOE and COE), his contributions to the academic community and professional organizations (LEI), his work in operations research, and his ability to bring all these networks together. “He creates very strong interactions between all these things… I don’t think very many people do that. I’m not able to do that well, even though I know how he does it. He has this skill about bringing all this together, and you’ll never feel he’s selling you something. He’s genuinely interested and develops that network and that collaboration.”
In her PhD dissertation, Rachna acknowledge Peter with the following:
A guru
(a Sanskrit term for a spiritual guide, teacher, or a master of a specific field)
A guru does not teach merely by fact, but
a guru allows and lets you learn.
A guru exposes you to new ways of thinking, and
expands your horizons to uncharted territories.
A guru shows you an image of what you can become.
You are one such guru!
“He’s just an incredibly decent guy; he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body,” says Jim. His demeanor allows “people to relax and then they can talk about what’s on their mind in a constructive way rather than a defensive way. Wish the whole world worked like that.”
“He’s actually just a good human being,” says Tom. “I’m not normally this excited about talking about somebody that I work with, but Peter’s a pretty special guy… He is the type of person that I think we all strive to be in caring for people and caring for what lean can do, the principles of respect for people and making the world a better place. He really lives that within his life.”
“I definitely can say I would not be where I am today if it wasn’t for Peter’s mentorship,” says Peg. Peter gave her and others the opportunity to be surrounded by knowledgeable people and to learn “what lean means.” In an academic environment where often hard lines are drawn to differentiate among tenured, non-tenured, and adjuncts, there was never any prejudice with Peter, say Peg. “It’s like, ‘Are you here? Are you contributing? Are you willing to learn? Can you bring something to the table?’… It’s never been about himself. It’s always been about what we can do together as a community and how he can help that community grow.”
