Épisodes

  • Respect for People

    Respect for People
    Oct 26 2026
    This episode starts in Fremont, California. A GM plant known as one of the worst in its system reopened under Toyota with largely the same workforce, and within a few years it was building some of GM's best cars. Same people. Different system. The difference was whether raising a problem was punished or welcomed.
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    17 min
  • Just-in-Time for Agents

    Just-in-Time for Agents
    Oct 13 2026
    This episode starts in a supermarket. In 1956, Taiichi Ohno saw shelves that were never piled high — restocked only as customers took what they needed. The customer pulled. The store replaced. That became just-in-time, the second pillar of the Toyota Production System. A few episodes ago, we built an agent that knows when to stop. This time I want to tell you about the day one of our agents did exactly what we asked. On its first morning, it drafted about two hundred credit-and-rebills in roughly twenty minutes. It worked perfectly. And it buried the team it was built to help. A rule that had been sitting quietly in the process turned a pile of drafts into a pile of rework overnight. We didn't have an agent problem. We had a flow problem. I get into what just-in-time actually means, why so much batching in knowledge work was a human constraint all along, and the idea I keep coming back to: in the age of agents, capacity isn't the constraint anymore. Human attention is. Flow the machine work. Level the human work. I also share how the bottleneck moved once we fixed the first one, how we plan to take a review step away on evidence, and why a process can get faster and slower at the same time. If you take one thing away: pace your agents to your people. Never pace your people to your agents. This continues the Lean AI arc, following Setting True North. I'm Chris Bradley, CMO at Veritiv and head of the AI Transformation Lab. Subscribe for new episodes biweekly.
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    19 min
  • Charting the Path to an AI-Native Operation

    Charting the Path to an AI-Native Operation
    Sep 28 2026
    The episode opens on hoshin kanri, the Japanese practice documented by Bridgestone in 1965: leadership sets a fixed direction, and the people closest to the work discover the path. Lean calls that direction True North, and distinguishes two speeds of moving toward it — kaizen, continuous improvement, and kaikaku, radical change.
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    23 min
  • AI Standard Work

    AI Standard Work
    Sep 14 2026
    Chris Bradley argues that distinction now decides whether an enterprise AI program compounds or stalls. Ohno's rule was that without a standard there can be no kaizen. The AI version is stricter: you cannot automate a process that was never standardized, because there is nothing for the agent to execute. Most failed pilots, he suggests, are operations problems that AI happened to expose.
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    24 min
  • Jidoka for Agents: Building AI That Knows When to Stop

    Jidoka for Agents: Building AI That Knows When to Stop
    Aug 31 2026
    Sakichi Toyoda's breakthrough was not a loom that could handle a broken thread. It was a loom that noticed the thread had broken and stopped itself — which meant one operator could run dozens of machines instead of standing guard over one. That principle became jidoka, and Chris Bradley argues it is the most useful idea available to anyone deploying AI agents in an enterprise today.
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    24 min
  • Context, Loops, and Graphs

    Context, Loops, and Graphs
    Aug 17 2026
    Chris Bradley argues the churn is hiding something worth understanding. Those terms don't replace each other; they stack. And each one names a layer of the same discovery: that the model is not what separates an AI program that works from one that doesn't.
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    21 min
  • The ROI Reckoning

    The ROI Reckoning
    Aug 3 2026
    Chris Bradley takes on the number that reset the enterprise AI conversation — a widely-cited MIT study finding 95% of pilots delivered no measurable return — and locates the real cause. Much of what is sold as agentic AI is generative AI wearing an agent title. It advises. A person still completes the work. And the promised time savings were never structurally possible.
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    24 min
  • The Art of Rightsizing AI

    The Art of Rightsizing AI
    Jul 20 2026
    In this episode, Chris Bradley makes sense of a landscape that shifted fast in June and July. A new most-capable model. A family that ships in three deliberate sizes. And a wave of open-weight models from the US and China that companies can run inside their own walls. His frame for all of it is rightsizing: matching the model to the work the way a manager matches a person to a task. He sorts the work into three tiers, the Clerk for high-volume routine work, the Operator for the reliable execution that runs the business, and the Expert for the hard, high-stakes reasoning.
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    19 min