Dr. Steven Spear, MIT prof — Dr. Steven Spear is a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, principal of the advisory firm HVE LLC, and author of The High-Velocity Edge and my favorite quote of this entire conversation was “great managers facilitate discovery.”
Spear asks why transactional decisions are always the go-to solution for leadership, despite knowing there is no way they’re going to work? Do leaders simply want to look busy?
He addresses the speed of learning, what hinders it, and what questions leaders truly need to be asking, (and also why bad leaders will praise good advice and ignore it anyway) and discussed what it means to get smarter, faster and how important getting to the right answer as fast as possible is and why bosses would rather you ignore problems that will result in failure than simply address and fix them.
Dr. Spear recently wrote an article in The Hill on the bizarre market reaction of GM closing facilities and gave this thought-provoking presentation for a bunch of software developers in October.
Spear’s research has been acknowledged with five Shingo Prizes and a McKinsey award from Harvard Business Review. His “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” and “Learning to Lead at Toyota,” are part of the lean manufacturing canon.
His “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today” and articles in Annals of Internal Medicine and Academic Medicine have been on the forefront in healthcare improvement. He’s contributed to the Boston Globe and New York Times and has appeared on Bloomberg and CBS.
Clients have included Intel, Lockheed Martin, Intuit, Novelis, Alcoa, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, and the US Navy.
Among other accomplishments, Spear helped the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative create its ‘Perfecting Patient Care System.’ That has been credited with eliminating horrible complications like central line infections and thereby improving care quality while reducing cost.
Additional links on Dr. Steven Spear
Podcast Episode with Dr. Steve Spear on Homelessness Elimination
Piece by Dr. Steve Spear on learning from mistakes.
Buy Dr. Steve Spear’s Book, The High-Velocity Edge
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