Becoming a Lean leader sure doesn’t happen overnight. Lean leaders transform their listening and team-building skills to usher in eras of far-reaching and continuous improvements. Carolyn Corvi, a true example of Lean Leadership, learned her craft over many years of study and implementation of the Toyota Production System. Here’s a visual look at some of the main ingredients in her education:

Corvi’s skills are built on years and years of a passion to continuous learning.
 
In my opinion, history will record that Corvi took every piece, every bit, of learning as a Sloan Fellow at MIT and her trips to Japan to study the Toyota Production System and the technical advice of our Shingijutsu Sensei's and made it all happen. It was a brilliant, major breakthrough in the style and thinking of Toyota. Corvi achieved unheard of production gains of 50%, a space reduction of 40%, and a cultural shift to on-site teamwork and persistent communication. Corvi successfully addressed the antiquated separation of mechanics and manufacturing employees who were building the Boeing 373 in batch production. Since serving on the board at VMMC, she has been instrumental in ushering in similar transformations at Virginia Mason, a testament to the depth of her learning and her ability to translate the Toyota Production System’s potential for healthcare.

When I first approach healthcare leaders about Lean, I’m often met with skepticism. Sometimes their questions center on a version of the following:
 
How can a system developed for Japanese auto-manufacturing, then advanced by Boeing for American plane manufacturing, possibly have relevant application in healthcare systems worldwide?
 
The connections seem far-fetched at first, but the power of Lean is that it is more than a narrow set of instructions; lean is an adaptable process for effecting organizational transformation regardless of the industry. Lean originated in Japan with the Toyota Production System, but its approach provides a universal roadmap to improvement. To illustrate the dynamic possibilities of lean, let’s look at the career of Carolyn Corvi, who led the adaptation of the Toyota Production System into the Boeing Production System and subsequently led and influenced transformations in the healthcare field.
 
By the 1980s, wasteful practices crept into Boeing’s production line. Leadership at Boeing, including Corvi, looked to Japan’s booming economy for answers.

 
Corvi introduced the concepts of Toyota’s moving line first at Boeing’s Propulsion Systems Division, and later to 737 airplane assembly. A meeting with Sensei Nakao, then President of Shingijutsu Co, LTD, as well as travels to Japan introduced Corvi to the innovative approaches at the Toyota factory. There, leaders acted as coaches, harnessing the full capacity of their workers’ abilities and inspiring their teams to continuously improve. Corvi was impressed with the technical genius of Toyota’s system and immediately saw possibilities for revolutionizing Boeing’s production line.
 
As Corvi adapted the methods of Toyota’s moving line to Boeing’s Propulsion Systems Division, the changes closed the gap between engineers and workers on the ground. This new system required a skillfully guided shift in company culture that revolutionized employee communication and collaboration. Corvi’s work made a significant contribution to Boeing’s reduction of factory cycle time by 46 percent and reduced defects of 90 percent. Boeing’s product quality went up as their costs went down.
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Boeing’s success adopting and adapting the Toyota Production System (TPS) inspired Corvi to apply lean principles to another industry: healthcare. Just as successful plane manufacturing produces quality, defect-free jets, healthcare facilities’ strive to provide quality, mistake-free care to patients. In 2001, Corvi joined the board at Virginia Mason Medical Center (VMMC) where executive leadership had committed to adopt the Toyota Production System both at the hospital and throughout the entire health system. VMMC leaders visited the Boeing factory and began to learn how to apply TPS to transform employee communication and operations across all levels of patient care. TPS resulted in greater transparency and commitment to continual improvement in the patient care system, both cutting costs and leading to healthier and happier patients.
 
Lean’s applications are truly endless as long as the leadership is committed to seeing the process through. In Corvi’s words, “Lean is not a manufacturing tactic or a cost reduction initiative. It’s a management system that applies to all organizations.  It requires courage, conviction, willingness to take risk and a ‘leap of faith’.” (Corvi 2010).
 
No matter what industry you’re in, I encourage you to set your vision for what your organization can achieve. Chances are you’ve already got the people in place to make your vision a reality, and applying Lean methods will enable the changes needed to make best use of the personnel and facility resources you already have.
 
 
Want to learn more about Corvi's Lean education? Click here.
 
 

Sources:
Black, John R. 2008. Lean Production: Implementing a World Class Production System, Industrial Press, Inc.
Black, John R. 2015. The Toyota Way to Healthcare Excellence, 2nd ed. Health Administration Press.
Corvi, Carolyn. Personal interview with John Black. February 15, 2015.
Corvi Carolyn. Presentation to Siemens Corporation. 2010.
Dec 2004/Jan 2005. High Speed Performance, In Boeing Frontiers Magazine, vol 3, issue 8 available online at http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2004/december/i_ca1.html

​On a visit to Japan several years ago, when I was first becoming acquainted with the concepts of Lean Manufacturing, I visited a beautiful 1,200 year old Japanese temple built of wood. It was a great reminder of the Japanese inclination to plan and act with many years of the future in mind, and it symbolized one of the most interesting paradoxes of Lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing is a philosophy with a goal of continuous improvement over many years, yet it is based on the small acts that make up daily work. At Toyota, where the philosophy of Lean was developed, its practitioners think in terms of 100 years. They are serious when they say their goal is perfection and that after 50 years they are halfway there.
 
This quest for perfection is a way of life. Perfection is achieved by many small improvements made continuously. The simple but startling truth is that focusing on the long term drives us to focus on the present, rather than the past or the future. And the present is where we need to be to replace mental models about people, space, and equipment.
 
The organizations we work to improve today will last through our lifetime and our children’s lifetimes. Lean principles require us to embrace that long-term view and live with the consciousness that what we do today is part of a continually improving process. It is never done.
 
While many American consultants counsel only the big, expensive changes, the Japanese philosophy of Lean is based on small, steady, incremental changes. Instead of grandiose theories or laborious planning, the Lean outlook calls for seizing opportunities to eliminate wasted time, motion, materials, and space right now. As one of the senseis from Shingijutsu Company once said in mild exasperation, “Don’t brainstorm, trystorm! You won’t know if an idea is any good unless you’ve attempted it.”
 
This philosophy centers on the value of people. Part of the Lean vision is the fundamental belief in people and people-building. People must change paradigms. When changes come from the work itself, as instigated by the people who do that work, organizations change naturally. Structures change from hierarchical to flat.
 
When we impose cultural change by imposing great process improvements from the top, we are working counter to Lean philosophy. Recreating the foundation from the bottom, through continuous improvement, will result in an improved company that will last. But first must come a new way of looking at work—as part of a great continuum.
 
If thinking in terms of decades and centuries seems overwhelming, consider this: I learned from my time at Boeing that the working life of an individual employee was shorter than the products we were selling. Those who designed the 707 were no longer with us by the time I worked there. To succeed, we must remember that improvement is incremental and continuous, and so are the rewards.