Senior Thought Leaders Review

I’m as surprised as anyone that over twenty years have elapsed since I first began developing lean enterprises through system design and development, and implementation. It’s been a remarkable time as I’ve been fortunate to guide organizations both strategically and tactically through the transformation process – making real, lasting impact in their operations and cultures.

My career began ‘normally’ enough as a manufacturing engineer with Aisin Seiki, a Toyota Group company transplanted to North America to support Toyota. This provided solid, rapid learning opportunities and equipped me to hold positions in engineering, operations, and management working to implement and evolve lean into operational and business practices. Consulting with organizations ranging from small privately-held to huge-global corporations rounds out my experience over these twenty years.

Anyone who knows me realizes that research is one of my passions – always the curious engineer. I’ve researched at length the evolution of manufacturing in the United States with an emphasis on lean’s influence and development. In natural progression, I also researched and worked to re-deploy TWI (Training Within Industry) and uncovered its tie with the Toyota Way. I am also working on the deep history of Ford’s Highland Park plant and its direct tie to Toyota’s business model and methods of operation. A current project is researching and writing on the historical and economic lineage of the United States and the lean business model. Stay tuned for this one!

To be completely honest, I didn’t set out on this career path to become the president and founder of Lean Frontiers, producing the Lean Accounting Summit, TWI Summit, Lean HR Summit, Lean IT Summit, Lean Coaching Summit, and Lean Asia-Pacific Summit. Now I can’t imagine any career more rewarding. It allows me to use my years of successful lean practice, continue researching almost to my heart’s content, and keep my pulse on the very latest thoughts and theories on lean enterprise. Meeting (and having personal relationships with) some of the world’s leading lean thought leaders has been an amazing, inspiring experience. And having the flexibility to help move our corporate vision forward has made this lean journey remarkable.

I graduated from Purdue University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering Technology and received a M.S. in Engineering Management from the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Along the way, I authored the book, Lean Cost Management: Accounting for Lean by Establishing Flow, was a contributing author to Lean Accounting: Best Practices for Sustainable Integration, and have authored many articles including the ground-breaking article, Roots of Lean – Training Within Industry: The Origin of Kaizen and, most recently, Deflation: The Road to Prosperity

We have observed – that a fundamental flaw in economics/business thinking and in reality, business behavior, is the lack of understanding of how wealth is really created.  Most think that the Wall Street function creates wealth – it does not.  While the movement of capital is certainly a critical function and need in a robust society and a productive society to move capital to where it is needed, ONLY production (making of things and service of things – both for other humans) creates wealth.  Wall Street only helps facilitate the creation of wealth – the making things (manufacturing) is the creation of wealth.  Unfortunately, a general worldview is taught that the shift of capital (pre-existing wealth) is wealth creation.  If you look at the way, we do much of traditional accounting and measurement it has much of this notion embedded into it.  If we look at what you are doing (as best I can thus far) you are really monitoring the points of “making things for a customer” or points where actual wealth is being generated.

Jim wrote:

My observation of QPS’s offering does indeed turn profit upside right and provides the information real time to the operations where it belongs. It runs contrary to today’s financial control systems. Lean has endeavored to put the internal monitoring in operations it appears you have found a short cut as to accomplish this required step in today’s information requirements. We at Lean Frontiers would like to help spread the word about your unique approach.

Professor Emeritus, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University

Dr. Hall is Professor Emeritus, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. In the late 1970s he came across “Japanese manufacturing,” and began sounding the alarm to manufacturers. Zero Inventories (1982) was the first of many “lean” books. In 1985 he was a cofounder of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence. For 22 years he edited its publication, Target.

However, “Doc” questions everything. The Soul of the Enterprise (1992) was a critique of Lean at the time. Compression (2009) proposes a major shift in business and economic practices to meet 21st century challenges – Compression Thinking, which one can think of as digging deeper than Lean. Doc is now chairman of the Compression Institute.

Doc Hall was mentored by Ono in Japan the father of the Lean Toyota Concepts. He then was the first to introduce Toyota Lean process to America. He is considered the leading expert of Lean. Doc has toured worldwide on behalf of lean principles.

Manufacturing Hall of Fame 2012 Inductee: Robert ‘Doc’ Hall

For more than 30 years, Hall has been both a student and strong advocate of Japanese production methods and lean manufacturing techniques. An Industry Week Best Plants judge since 1990, Hall is a founding member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence.

January 29, 2013

by Sally Winter

When it came time for Industry Week magazine to honor the most influential executive and thought leaders in U.S. manufacturing, the organization inducted Kelley School of Business Professor Emeritus Robert “Doc” Hall into the 2012 Manufacturing Hall of Fame.

“You cannot have a discussion about the early proponents of lean manufacturing in the United States without placing Robert ‘Doc’ Hall high on that list,” the Industry Week article read. “For more than 30 years, Hall has been both a student and strong advocate of Japanese production methods and lean manufacturing techniques.”

With a background in engineering and manufacturing at both Eli Lilly and Union Carbide, Hall began teaching in 1970. His book “Zero Inventories,” published in 1983, was among the first on the topic of lean manufacturing.

“In the late ’70s, a man who is still my Japanese sensei on lean came to the university with three industry friends to take a course in Indianapolis,” Hall said. “I was teaching an MBA materials management course, featuring MRP (Material Requirements Planning), and they wanted an official course. One Uno the creator of the Toyota Lean concept. It was my tour in Japan that I became current with Toyota’s Lean principles.

Doc Hall Wrote:

Connectivity is not communication

Connectivity is not communication, much less understanding. A central grasp of the situation with QPS (visibility systems) makes the process itself into its own message to everyone at once. Everybody knows what to do that is routine without meetings, directives, and the process is its own prompter for improvement. Few power games, or misunderstandings, no politics, future profit picture puzzle real-time measurement owned by operations. Attacking the what not the who, manufacturing methods not people.

Dr. Dean Spitzer is President of Dean R. Spitzer & Associates Inc., located in Melbourne, Florida, and is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authorities on performance measurement and management. His latest book “Transforming Performance Measurement” has been hailed as a ‘breakthrough,’ ‘a masterpiece,’ and ‘the most important book ever written about performance measurement.’ Dr. Spitzer’s advice and counsel is sought by companies and government agencies throughout the world. During his distinguished career, he has helped more than 100 organizations on five continents improve their performance. Dr. Spitzer’s client list reads like a Who’s Who of outstanding companies. He has been a leader and internal change agent in the private and public sectors, a professor at 5 universities, the author of 8 books (including the international best-seller “Super Motivation”) and over 200 articles and book chapters, and a keynote and featured presenter at more than 100 conferences. Dr. Spitzer has received many honors for his significant professional contributions, including being selected as a Fellow of the Advanced Performance Institute (http://www.ap-institute.com/about_fellows.asp) and receiving two President’s Awards from the International Society for Performance Improvement. He also holds the prestigious Certified Performance Technologist (CPT) designation. Dr. Spitzer earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California and his M.A. from Northwestern University and pursued both undergraduate and graduate studies at the London School of Economics.

Dean Spitzer wrote:

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew exactly what your profit/pricing was going to be at any particular moment, know every profit/pricing touch point by departments, work centers drilled down to every activities of all stakeholders and you could plan, schedule, measure/manage and reward to ensure that you will meet your profit/pricing/pricing goals real-actionable-time, and if everyone in your company could make profit/pricing decisions and act on them real-actionable-time that would ensure that your profit/pricing goals would be met?  Quantum Profit/pricing System’s (QPS) Profit/pricing Assurance System (PAS) in the cloud can help you manage your company’s profit/pricing ability so that it is always on-track to your profit/pricing goal.  Sound too good to be true?  Let us show you how QPS can revolutionize the way you run your business with no risk and almost no changes in your existing operational and management information systems. The difference is simply better information real-time!

QPS is a powerful, easy-to-implement, and low-cost management system that enables your company to plan, schedule, and manage PROFIT/PRICING in real time. It works by making profit/pricing the ‘set point’ and all other factors are subordinated to it.  Profit/pricing is visible at all times, to everybody, so that your employees can make informed decisions and understand the profit/pricing implications of each decision or change that is made. This will not only make them better employees; it will make them smarter more interested employees.

Most companies are currently running blind with respect to profit/pricing and make decisions based on untimely and inaccurate profit/pricing projections. Every decision that is made in your company has profit/pricing implications and managers and employees currently don’t know or care what they are. Profit/pricing is too abstract a concept and so they ignore it. Instead, they act on what they intuitively think is best.  That is not a good way to run a business – especially not in the 21^st Century! You don’t need to run your business like that anymore.

Are you ever surprised that your actual profit/pricing isn’t consistent with your profit/pricing projections? With QPS this will not happen again.  No surprises – ever again!  QPS enables your business to consistently monitor and realize the optimal profit/pricing of which your business operations are capable, and it will help you make the right decisions at the right time for the right reason to improve operational capability at any time with no more guesswork.

Jahn is a CEO/CFO Self-Auditing Coach, Large-scale Collaboration Designer / Facilitator and Cultural Architect. He is the Value Creation Accounting Officer (VCAO), Senior System Steward & Founding Dir. at www.integralpmi.com &www.commons.org.

Jahn Ballard has created a private sector response to failure by U.S. institutions to require direct cash reporting – since in 25 years, voluntary practical transparency of bank account activity has less than 2% U.S. market adoption.

Mr. Ballard is the Inventor/Designer of Accounting 3.0 ® and Value Creation Accounting (VCA)(CC), two new fields of practice within the emerging discipline of Behavioral Accounting. His VCA and A 3.0 ™ mathematically link financial statement data that are driven by value-creating activities and internal resources effectiveness indicators. Jahn is writing a 2^nd Edition of Chuck Kramer et-al’s seminal Managing by the Numbers, 2000, for Basic Books, of Perseus Books Group, NY. He also co-designed the Financial Scoreboard (http://www.integralpmi.com/scoreboards.html, with Chuck Kremer, CPA. Since 2004, he has tested a voluntary financial disclosure tool (www.financialdashboard.com), reflecting overall financial health, as 3 crucial performance pictures graphed on one page.

PMI’s Business Culture Architecture & Organization Design enable leadership to convert existing, yet hidden and/or invisible knowledge assets, into unanimous written agreement and rock-solid tactical alignment. PMI turns financial and value creation statements into at-a-glance scoreboards & dashboards – practical collaboration tools CEOs and CFOs use for finance, operations and resources data, which transform prioritizing, employee engagement & creativity; and generate predictable business results.

PMI’s no-fee Chart of Behaviors drafting template encourages business leaders to draft a complete value creation accounting framework; first by defining the sequencing of value-creating activities that fulfill their mission, as well as generate satisfied and loyal customers and all their financial results.

Jahn partners with the Maryland Assn of CPAs’ (www.macpa.org). He has delivered Executive Finance for Operating Leaders since 1997, providing executive finance training to nearly 1,000 CFO’s, Controllers and CPA’s (8 CPE hours, Accounting and Auditing Credits). MACPA is also one of several PMI cases featured in Jahn’s forthcoming book. Since 2001, MACPA has been a PMI tool user applying value creation accounting to re-inventing its business model, after over a century of continuing service to 9,000 CPAs. Case 2 – VCA makes a difference in a family-owned private mint, Osborne Coinage, Cincinnati, est. 1835.

Value Creation Accounting will debut in Business Arithmetic – Managing Value by the Numbers, a 2^nd Edition of Managing by the Numbers, A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Using Your Company’s Financials, INC / Perseus, 2000. The 1^stEdition is an applied ‘Street Simple Finance MBA’. The 2nd edition will be simple & practical, enabling resilience for entrepreneurs, and other leaders, to be effective creators of true wealth and sustainable jobs, by adding real world cases and no-fee business assessment tools.

Jahn is the founding director of

The Commons: an Institute of the Whole, a California not-for-profit that is spinning off PMI. His passion is creating working and learning environments where everyone can contribute their gifts and talents by building shared language, images, and business plans among and between different specialties and disciplines. He has spent decades doing business development, large-scale collaboration design, collaborative leadership development, and facilitating large-scale strategic summits for companies, communities and public benefit organizations. He is a twenty-five-year practitioner of the Institute of Cultural Affairs’ Technology of Participation, as well as of Open Space Technology and World Cafe.

He is also a co-developer of Sonoma County, CA’s www.golocal.coop since 2002, with now over 50 local leaders contributing, 350 locally-owned business members. He designed & co-founded 20 plus year-old Leadership Santa Barbara County, with over 500 Graduates – still a flourishing civic leadership endeavor. He is an advisor to the North Bay Area’s 9th annual Sustainable Enterprise Conference.

Jahn wrote:

“The Founder of QPS is a brilliant inventor and turnaround artist who has created the only tool I have ever seen that operationalizes the Theory of Constraints with profit the constraint not inventory. He created this tool through decades of factory work from the shop floor to General Management President, CEO and owner. His tool by transforming the P&L from a trailing fiction into a tool that connects directly to the core of the business plan. He then links it [the P&L] transparently and effectively to every hour of direct labor, providing the only thing I have ever seen that fully integrates operating reality with the levers to sculpt financial results.”

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the whitepaper and presentation. I’ve read them both. The power point is very dense with data and would be a challenge for most CEOs I know to absorb.

Van Lanier wrote:

Here are my comments, for what they may be worth; The logic is sound, the product is a breakthrough in profit modeling and control. As such, I think you’ll find that the real market consists of manufacturers at and above $50 million. From my experience, most small companies would not readily embrace this level of sophistication, primarily because they don’t have the talent or motivation. If you are serious about taking this product to market, I would suggest you target the CEO. I’d focus on private companies first then follow with public companies after you have established a beachhead. Yes, the CFO will be asked his opinion, but you should go in at the top, rather than try to win over the CFO, who is beholden to the accounting profession for his livelihood. Most CFOs are simply accountants with large salaries and detest change as part of their DNA.

Van Lanier
Lanier Turnaround Group, LLC
12801 Worldgate Drive, Suite 500
Herndon, VA 20170