Steven Spear
Operational Excellence and Innovation Expert
Steven Spear, author of Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition, is a well-recognized expert in how exceptional organizations create competitive advantage through the strength of their internal operations. Spear has been published in numerous medical journals and op-ed publications. He was the recipient of a McKinsey Award as one of the best Harvard Business Review articles in 2005 and has won four Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence. An MIT senior lecturer, Spear teaches a course about lean manufacturing and six sigma in the Leaders for Manufacturing Program.
Steven Spear (DBA MS MS) is author of the award winning and critically acclaimed book, Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition. A Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Spear is internationally known for his expertise in innovation, operational excellence, and organizational learning, with deep expertise in industry and health care. This reputation is due, in part, to his 1999 Harvard Business Review article, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,” and his 2005 article, “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today” which was an HBR McKinsey Award winner and one of his five works to win a Shingo Research Prize. In Chasing the Rabbit, Spear explains how the world's most competitive organizations uncork the tremendous innovative capacity of their people in identifying market needs, developing products and services to meet those needs, and delivering those items with unmatchable speed and alacrity, and how other companies can do the same.
Spear has worked with many organizations to develop their capacity for improvement, innovation, and competitiveness. He helped develop and deploy the Alcoa Business System the late 1990s and the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative’s 'Perfecting Patient Care' a few years after. Spear has worked with several other leading academic medical centers including Massachusetts General Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering, and he is on a patient safety advisory panel for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Other clients have included Intel, Lockheed Martin, and Intuit, and he collaborates actively with Toyota and its North American suppliers.
An active thought leader, Spear has published in the NY Times, the Boston Globe, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Academic Medicine, and he has spoken to audiences ranging from the Association for Manufacturing Excellence to the Institute of Medicine. Spear was previously employed by Prudential-Bache, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, the University of Tokyo, and Harvard Business School. His academic credentials include a doctorate from Harvard Business School, masters in engineering and in management from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton.
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3. Manufacturing and Industry
Key Points:
·Lean Manufacturing ·Productivity and Efficiency ·Competitiveness ·Organizational Learning ·Operational Excellence ·Leadership ·High Velocity Organizations ·Competing in Difficult Economic Times
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2. Health Care
Key Points:
·Patient Safety ·Quality of Care ·Better Care for More People at Less Cost ·Improving Health Care Delivery
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1. Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance The Competition
Across a broad variety of hyper competitive sectors, a few organizations simply outrun their competition. Though competing in the same markets for the same customers, offering similar products and services, reliant on the same suppliers, and subject to the same rules and regulations, they nevertheless generate more value (from the customers' perspective), in less time, with less effort, at less cost. The result is growing market share and higher margins. The resulting success pays dividends to all concerned: customers, suppliers, employees, and shareholders.
The secret to the success of these leaders is that when they face the common challenges of identifying market needs, generating product and service designs to meet those needs, and generating those offerings, they attack all the attendant uncertainty that is involved with innovation that is so organically institutionalized in their organizations that no one can match its speed, endurance, or breadth.
Fortunately, applying institutionalized innovation across the board is not merely the realm of a few idiosyncratic inspired geniuses. Rather, it depends on core capabilities that can be taught, cultivated, practiced, and applied effectively. The workshop will:·Introduce the capabilities that characterize the highest velocity, most innovative organizations
·Explore how they apply in your particular work
·Identify what leaders need to do to cultivate and engage the capabilities
·Develop an action plan for initial 'test of concept.'
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April 2010The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition
In The High-Velocity Edge, the reissued edition of Steven J. Spear’s critically acclaimed book Chasing the Rabbit, Spear describes what sets market-dominating companies apart and provides a detailed framework you can leverage to surge to the lead in your own industry. Spear examines the internal operations of dominant organizations across a wide spectrum of industries, from technology to design and from manufacturing to health care.
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September 2008Chasing the Rabbit
How can companies perform so well that their industry counterparts are competitors in name only? Although they operate in the same industry, serve the same market, and even use the same suppliers, these “rabbits” lead the race and, more importantly, continually widen their lead. In Chasing the Rabbit, Steven J. Spear describes what sets high-velocity, market-leading organizations apart and explains how you can lead the pack in your industry.
Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition
Duration: One Day
Target Audiences: Senior Executives, Managers, Human Resource Professionals
Across a broad variety of hyper competitive sectors, a few organizations simply outrun their competition - generating more value, in less time, with less effort, at less cost. The secret to the success of these organizations is that they attack all the market uncertainty with innovation that is so organically institutionalized in their organizations that no one can match its speed, endurance, or breadth. Learn to integrate these core capacities into your organization.
Across a broad variety of hyper competitive sectors, a few organizations simply outrun their competition. Though competing in the same markets for the same customers, offering similar products and services, reliant on the same suppliers, and subject to the same rules and regulations, they nevertheless generate more value (from the customers' perspective), in less time, with less effort, at less cost. The result is growing market share and higher margins. The resulting success pays dividends to all concerned: customers, suppliers, employees, and shareholders.
The secret to the success of these leaders is that when they face the common challenges of identifying market needs, generating product and service designs to meet those needs, and generating those offerings, they attack all the attendant uncertainty that is involved with innovation that is so organically institutionalized in their organizations that no one can match its speed, endurance, or breadth.
Objective
Fortunately, applying institutionalized innovation across the board is not merely the realm of a few idiosyncratic inspired geniuses. Rather, it depends on core capabilities that can be taught, cultivated, practiced, and applied effectively. The workshop will:
introduce the capabilities that characterize the highest velocity, most innovative organizations,
explore how they apply in your particular work,
identify what leaders need to do to cultivate and engage the capabilities, and
develop an action plan for initial 'test of concept'
Method
The day-long workshop will involve presentations, case studies, exercises, and break out sessions to achieve its goals.
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