Dr. Steven J. Spear MIT Sloan School of Management, USA

Steven Spear is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He is the author of The High-Velocity Edge and a well-recognized expert in how exceptional organizations create competitive advantage through the strength of their internal operations. These high... read morevelocity organizations manage complex design, production, and administrative processes for unmatched performance based on unmatched rates of internally generated improvement and innovation. His articles, "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System" and "Learning to Lead at Toyota" have been widely read and have become part of the lean manufacturing canon. Spear's "Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today," won a McKinsey Award as one of the best Harvard Business Review articles in 2005 and his fourth Shingo Prize for Research Excellence. He has published in Annals of Internal Medicine and other medical journals as well and has had op-ed pieces in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Fortune.com, and Industry Week. He has been interviewed on Bloomberg TV and radio and on CBS News and quoted in a number of magazines and newspapers and has spoken to audiences as diverse as the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and the Institute of Medicine. As a consultant and advisor, Spear works actively with organizations to develop their capacity for high speed sustained improvement and innovation. Dr. Spear's academic degrees include a doctorate from Harvard Business School, masters degrees - in management and mechanical engineering - from MIT, and a bachelors degree in economics from Princeton. He worked for the investment bank Prudential-Bache, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, and the University of Tokyo, and he taught at Harvard Business School for six years.