3/24/10   

Steven Spear

Chasing the Rabbit 

Link to session evaluation

Steven Spear is an expert in how organizations—particularly those in exceptionally competitive sectors—outrace their rivals with unmatched rates of sustained innovation in products, services, and delivery. A Harvard Business Review commentator observed, “Spear has dazzled readers with his insights into how any organization can use his ideas to improve its effectiveness.” His insights were originally based on an extensive analysis of Toyota that won major awards in Japan and in the United States; he now has applied them to a broad range of industries, that including financial services, software, new product development and production, heavy and high-tech manufacturing, commercial and military situations, and healthcare.

Among the things you will learn from this session are:

• How competitive advantage can be generated in even the most arduous markets;

• How to foster and sustain high-velocity, high-endurance improvement, innovation, and invention;

• How to respond to small problems as indications of what needs to be better understood, where improvement is needed, and what must be learned.
  

More about Steven …

He is a Senior Lecturer at MIT and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He has a doctorate from Harvard Business School, masters degrees in engineering and in management from MIT, and a bachelors degree in economics from Princeton.  He is an expert in how organizations – particularly those in highly competitive sectors – can outrace their rivals with rates of product, service, and delivery process innovation that can’t be matched. And he has used his expertise to enhance the competitiveness of companies in myriad industries, including high tech, heavy industry, product development, financial services, and software. He has also worked with Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative hospitals, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham Women's Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess, and Memorial Sloan Kettering to help them advance the quality of care.

As an author, Steven has won the Shingo Research Prize three times for articles about Toyota, the Toyota Production System, and Lean Manufacturing, and a McKinsey Award for one of the two best HBR articles in 2005. His most heralded work, though, is his new book, Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition and How Great Companies Can Catch Up and Win. And, it’s the ideas from the book that he will cover in his session with us.

To give you a real sense of how important these ideas are, we defer to Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School. Christensen wrote the foreword to Spear’s book and we quote from it here.

“Steve Spear walked into the Harvard Business School as a doctoral student 12 years ago, and got to work trying to unravel an intriguing puzzle. Despite Toyota’s openness and all that had been written about the ‘secrets’ to its success, no other company had been able to replicate Toyota’s achievements in profitably making its cars continuously better and cheaper. His hunch, which proved right, was that prior students of Toyota’s methods had observed ‘artifacts’ of the system such as lean manufacturing and just-in-time scheduling of production. However, those researchers were measuring correlations between a factory’s possession of those attributes and its performance. No scholar had unearthed the causal mechanism that led to what Steve ultimately termed a self-improving system.

“To validate his hunch, Steve went into the factories of Toyota and its suppliers and competitors to learn from the inside out and answer the question, ‘How do these guys think when they design and improve a process?’ His interest wasn’t just in fabrication and assembly processes, though. He also studied processes such as training people, designing products, building management strength, and maintaining equipment. And every evening, he painstakingly chronicled everything he had observed.

“Out of that detail, Steve distilled the mental models and frameworks that people at Toyota instinctively followed when they designed, used, and improved a process of any sort. Those things weren’t written down anywhere, yet people seemed to follow them as if the rules were tattooed on the backs of their hands. Nobody—not even Toyota’s most senior managers—could articulate those culture-embedded instincts. Yet when Steve described them, they instantly agreed that those instincts were guiding their actions. Steve had uncovered the fundamental causal mechanisms underlying the success of the Toyota Production System. I honestly think that history will judge Steve Spear’s doctoral thesis to have been the finest, most impactful thesis ever written at the Harvard Business School, and that includes my own doctoral work on the phenomenon known as ‘disruptive technology'.

“The good news for us is that the causal mechanisms that Steven unearthed at Toyota are broadly applicable, and can be used by any company to continually improve their processes, whether they are processes for understanding customers, designing products that address customers’ needs, or making products at ever-increasing levels of quality and ever-decreasing cost.”

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