My guest for episode 546 is Gary Peterson, who recently retired from O.C. Tanner after helping lead the continuous improvement work that earned the company the Shingo Prize in 1999. Gary is an AME Hall of Fame inductee, and he now serves as an executive in residence at the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business, working with their Master of Business Operational Excellence (MBOE) program.

Gary started this work almost 40 years ago, before the word Lean was in common use. A change in how O.C. Tanner went to market shrank order sizes from thousands down to one or two, and a factory built for big batches started bleeding cost and quality. Gary stepped into a role called facilitator of change. He pulled departments apart, built one-piece flow, and asked frontline people to solve problems in a culture that had taught them it wasn't safe to speak up.

We spend a good part of the conversation on psychological safety and autonomy, and why Gary thinks neither one does much without the other. He also tells what he calls the hardest story in his repertoire. An employee stopped him on a stairwell to tell him his system wasn't working. She was right. He talked circles around her until she cried. What he did next, and what two people did a few hours later, became a turning point for him and for the company.

Topics we get into:

• Why a real business problem made the change easier to sustain than a "we read a book" mandate
• Leading change from the middle without support from the top
• Cutting a 1,800-person workforce roughly in half through attrition, with no layoffs, while raising the bar on what it meant to work there
• Momentum, entropy, and the 30 to 40 systems that quietly stopped during COVID
• Building succession so the culture didn't depend on Gary's energy alone
• Sincere, specific, timely praise, and why he coached frontline teams differently than VPs

Link to the episode and full transcript.

What would it take for you to tell a room full of people that you don't know what you're doing?

Jeff Liker was guest number three on this podcast back in August 2006. He has been back seven times since, which makes him one of the most frequent guests in the show's history.

For this episode, I pulled clips from across those eight conversations, going back almost twenty years. What stood out on the relisten was how much hasn't changed. The lean tools are better known now. There are more books, more case studies, more conferences. The deeper thing Jeff was naming in 2006 - that companies want the words without the work - is the same thing he is still saying in 2026.

These aren't his greatest hits. They are the ideas that keep showing up.

In this episode, Jeff talks about:

• The two percent problem: why so few companies have deeply implemented TPS as a system, even after decades of trying
• How long real transformation takes when Toyota opens a brand new plant under ideal conditions (hint: it isn't fourteen weeks)
• Why "picking and choosing" lean practices often reinforces the existing management system instead of changing it
• Fujio Cho on what was hardest to teach Americans about TPS, and why he had to walk the floor every day to teach it
• Andon, hansei, and why we keep trying to implement a "perfect" lean system instead of a flawed one we can improve
• The non-negotiables in Toyota Culture, including how Toyota responds when a purchasing manager wants to shut down a US supplier to save thirty percent
• "Don't skip hats" - what Jeff learned at the UK plant about roles, authority, and going to the gemba to observe rather than solve
• The difference between the five whys and the five whos, and why the goal isn't the deepest root cause but a controllable one

Read the full post with quotes and more at https://leanblog.org/545

Why do so many quality programs fall apart the moment the firefighter walks out the door?

My guest for this episode of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Chad Diggs, a quality management professional, consultant, author, and founder of DIQ (Digging Into Quality), an AI-powered quality platform built for mid-market manufacturers. Chad leads a team of quality engineers supporting first article inspection reviews for customers including Boeing, Collins Aerospace, and Honeywell.

Chad recently released his book, Below the Surface: Building Quality Systems, Not Heroes -- a practitioner's guide written as a story rather than a textbook. The narrative follows a quality manager named Christina Valles through pressures most quality leaders will recognize: shipping bad parts to hit a date, getting blamed for problems built into the system, and watching the same fires get fought again the next month.

We talk about why Chad chose a narrative format, the cost-of-poor-quality math that finally gets leadership's attention in the story (the number was 25 percent of revenue), and the difference between investigating where a defect happened and investigating who to blame for it.

Toward the end of the conversation, I share Isao Yoshino's story from his early Toyota days -- the one where management apologized to him after he put the wrong solvent in the paint line. It is a useful contrast to how most companies still respond to that kind of mistake.

Topics covered:

• Chad's path from a warehouse role to a 20-year quality career
• The opening scene of the book: a contaminated solvent and a VP who says, "12 percent failures? I can live with that."
• Leaders who walk the floor productively, and leaders who walk the floor and create chaos
• Why "cost of poor quality" is such an underused argument inside companies
• What a blameless investigation actually looks like
• Psychological safety and Amy Edmondson's work on The Fearless Organization
• Why firefighting feels like a badge of honor and why that is a problem
• Real succession planning for quality leaders
• DIQ, the platform Chad is building for mid-market manufacturers

Get the book and learn more at https://digin2quality.com

Read the full show notes and transcript at https://leanblog.org/544

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