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Jeffrey Liker  

Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan; Author of "The Toyota Way"

Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor Emeritus, Industrial and Operations Engineering at The University of Michigan and President of Liker Lean Advisors, LLC.

He is author of the best-selling book, "The Toyota Way, Second Edition," and has coauthored nine other books about Toyota including" The Toyota Way to Service Excellence," "Designing the Future," and "The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership." A recent graphic novel with Eduardo Lander and Tom Root tells the story of lean transformation at a mail-order company: "Lean in a High-Variability Business."

His articles and books have won thirteen Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence. He was inducted into the Association of Manufacturing Excellence Hall of Fame and the Shingo Academy.

Speech Topics


Leading to Develop People and Processes

Many companies profess a desire for continuous improvement, and a belief that leaders need to be coaches. But what does that mean? How do you develop those capabilities? Toyota has an answer. They have been developing people to be exceptional since the founding of the company and argue that “Before they can build excellent cars they must develop exceptional people.” The obsession with managing from the gemba, with a deep understanding of what goes on in the workplace, is mainly so managers can practice on-the-job development. And the core skill they are developing is problem solving, through a scientific thinking mindset. When asked how many industrial engineers a plant had the Toyota plant manager said, “we have 2200 team members so we must have 2200 industrial engineers.” This talk will focus on how Toyota develops managers at all levels to be leaders of continuous improvement drawing on The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership.

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