KPI Fireside: A Continuous Improvement Podcast

Miscommunication costs US businesses $1.2 trillion a year. That is not a communication problem. It is a listening problem, and Christine Miles has spent her career proving it.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, Keith Norris sits down with Christine Miles, keynote speaker, author, and founder of The Listening Path. Christine's background runs from home-based family therapy and structural family therapy training to organizational development consulting with hundreds of companies. She has distilled everything she learned into a simple, teachable framework that helps individuals and entire organizations close the gap between what is said and what is actually understood.

🔻 Why listening is a brain problem, not an ear problem, and why trying harder will not fix it

🔻 How less than two percent of people have any formal listening training and what that is actually costing your business

🔻 Why the listener is in charge of the conversation, not the speaker, and what changes when you know that

🔻 How six questions used by journalists, therapists, and negotiators can get you the full story every single time

🔻 Why summarizing what you heard before moving forward is the single highest-leverage alignment tool in any meeting

🔻 How to know whether your team's rework, missed deadlines, and lost deals trace back to a listening gap

📚 What Is It Costing You Not to Listen by Christine Miles: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=what+is+it+costing+you+not+to+listen

🌐 The Listening Path: https://thelisteningpath.com/

🌐 Christine Miles: https://www.christinemileslistens.com/

🔗 Connect with Christine on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thelisteningguide/

🔗 Follow Christine: @christine.miles.listens

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

Catherine Bennett has had a front row seat to Utah's business community for years. As executive editor of Utah Business, she has interviewed the founders, covered the failures, and watched the patterns repeat.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, Keith Norris sits down with Catherine Bennett, executive editor of Utah Business. Utah is a thriving place for business, receiving awards like Best State Overall from US News and World Report and Best State to Start a Business, and Catherine's role puts her in a unique position to interact with and observe some of the best businesses and leaders anywhere. A print journalism graduate turned marketer, entrepreneur, and continuous improver, Catherine has launched a marketing agency, led global communications teams, and held executive marketing roles with ties to Utah manufacturing, aerospace, and health sciences.

🔻 Why the most important job of any leader is helping other people grow

🔻 How Utah Business uses a values-based recognition system in Slack that keeps culture visible and repeatable every single day

🔻 What Utah's biggest opportunities actually are and why affordability and habitability are the baseline everything else depends on

🔻 Why showing up to the right rooms, even uncomfortable ones, is still the fastest way to build real business relationships in Utah

🔻 How the best leaders know when to facilitate a conversation and when to narrow the scope and make a call

Utah Business Forward is happening November 10. Use code FORWARD100 to get $100 off your ticket. Learn more and register at https://www.utahbusiness.com/

🔗 Connect with Catherine Bennett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherinebennettutah/

🌐 Utah Business: https://www.utahbusiness.com/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with returning guest Darril Wilburn, senior partner at Honsha, and first-time guest Hiro Yoshiki, who spent 35 years at Toyota Motor Corporation before serving as president of Futaba Industrial, a major Toyota group supplier. Hiro worked on the site selection for Toyota's first wholly owned U.S. plant in Kentucky, helped create the Toyota Way 2001, and led the Kentucky plant's turnaround. Together, Hiro and Darril have co-authored Courage, Humility, Kaizen: The Three Disciplines of Toyota Culture.

🔻 Why so many companies implement TPS tools and still fail to sustain any of it

🔻 What courage actually means at Toyota and why setting a vision is one of the most courageous things a leader can do

🔻 How Genchi Genbutsu goes wrong when leaders show up with the answer already in their head

🔻 How Toyota's escalation model works so that problems get solved at the lowest possible level

🔻 Why the relentless pursuit of QCD is the true definition of TPS and everything else is just technique

🔻 What healthy paranoia means and why Hiro says he prefers it to any amount of recognition or celebration

🔻 How Hiro learned to never label people and why that became one of the most important lessons of his career

📚 Courage, Humility, Kaizen by Darril Wilburn and Hiro Yoshiki:https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Humility-Kaizen-Disciplines-Leadership/dp/B0HJP39WQH/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0#detailBullets_feature_div

🌐 Learn more at Honsha: https://honsha.org/

🌐 Japan Study Missions with Darril and Hiro: https://www.honsha.org/events/executive-development-mission-next-edition/

🔗 Connect with Darril Wilburn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrilwilburn/

🔗 Connect with Hiro Yoshiki on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiroyoshi-yoshiki-619b86a0/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

If your accounting team is buried in rework, chasing down missing approvals, and fixing the same invoice errors every month, the problem is not your people. It is your process.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, Keith Norris welcomes back Nick Katko, the very first guest on the podcast, former CFO, lean accounting consultant, and author of multiple books on lean in finance. Nick's newest book is written specifically for accounting leaders who want to build a real continuous improvement system without having to become lean experts first.

🔻 How to apply PDCA in an accounting department without using a single piece of lean terminology

🔻 Why the four types of problems require four completely different responses and how to tell them apart

🔻 How a 43% invoice defect rate traced back to a flow problem nobody in accounting could see on their own

🔻 Why overtime is almost never a demand problem and what to measure instead to find the real cause

🔻 How the lean box score connects operational performance to financial performance in a way a spreadsheet never will

🔻 Why jumping to solutions before understanding root cause is the most common reason improvement events fail

🔻 What lean is really about, and why leaders who get that one thing right change everything

🔗 Connect with Nick Katko on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickkatko/

📚 Nick's books: https://maskell.com/about/our-books/

🌐 Accounting CI System book resources: https://www.accountingcisbook.com/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

Most organizations try to execute before they have ever aligned on what problem they are actually solving. Sylvie Fortier has spent her career fixing that.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Sylvie Fortier, founder of Phoenix Praxis and a veteran of Motorola during the foundational years of Six Sigma. Sylvie has carried that early education across telecommunications, financial services, technology startups, and now ambulatory surgery centers, where she helps leaders strip away complexity, surface what actually matters, and build operating models that can scale without scaling the friction. Her philosophy is straightforward: operational excellence is not about making people work harder. It is about making the optimal outcome easier, more visible, and more repeatable.

🔻 Why execution can never compensate for strategic ambiguity and what to align on first

🔻 What Motorola taught Sylvie that most organizations never figure out about defects outside the manufacturing floor

🔻 Why scattered data creates the illusion of visibility without creating any real understanding

🔻 How to tell the difference between clinical resistance and a team telling you your process design has a flaw

🔻 Why co-design matters more than a perfect process handed down from the outside

🔗 Connect with Sylvie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylviefortier/

🌐 Phoenix Praxis: https://thePhoenixPraxis.com Home to the 42-Second Phoenix Pulse, a free diagnostic that instantly baselines your exposure to integration bottlenecks and leadership dependency risk in just seven critical questions.

🌐 The Clean Food Protocol: https://TheCleanFoodProtocol.com Systems thinking applied to food sourcing and consumer choice.

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

Most managers were promoted because they were great at their job. Nobody taught them how to lead. Catherine McDonald is on a mission to fix that.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris welcomes back Catherine McDonald, founder of MCD Consulting and a leadership development coach who combines lean thinking, organizational behavior, and executive coaching to help managers at every level become the leaders their teams actually need.

🔻 Why time management is the foundation of every other leadership skill and how to use AI to finally build it

🔻 How to create your leader standard work in one week using nothing but your calendar and a chat with AI

🔻 Why asking one focused question gets you further in a coaching conversation than asking ten open ones

🔻 How to use the GROW model to structure a coaching conversation even if you have never been trained as a coach

🔻 Why you have to process the feeling before you can think clearly about the problem and how the FTLA model helps

🔻 Why recording your team meetings and running the transcript through AI is one of the best free feedback tools available

🔻 How to apply PDCA at the team level to make every meeting more useful than the last

🔗 Connect with Catherine McDonald on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-mcdonald-b6157210a/

🌐 Learn more about MCD Consulting: https://mcdconsulting.ie/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

The old story of work is gone. Work hard, be loyal, get rewarded, retire to a beach someday. That shared story no longer exists. So what story is your team telling instead?

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Jonathan David Lewis, president of McKee Wallwork, a brand strategy firm, Forbes contributor, and author of The Rebuilders: Daily Foundations for the Leaders We Need. Jonathan led a national psychographic study of over 3,000 workforce participants to understand how people think about work today, and what he found should change how every leader thinks about hiring, culture, and what it actually means to lead.

🔻 Why the shared story of work has fragmented and what that means for every person you hire

🔻 How 56% of today's workforce describing themselves as struggling or suffering should change how you lead

🔻 Why your most important job as a leader is not strategy or execution but telling the right story

🔻 Why laddering up the purpose of work is the difference between people who show up and people who are all in

🔻 Why you cannot take the same things for granted from this workforce that you could from the last one

🔻 How the idea at the center of your culture determines everything and most leaders have never named it

📚 The Rebuilders by Jonathan David Lewis: https://www.mckeewallwork.com/book-review/the-rebuilders-daily-foundations-for-the-leaders-we-need/

🔗 Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanlewis11/

🌐 Learn more about McKee Wallwork: https://www.mckeewallwork.com/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

Most CI programs start with good intentions and stall at one plant. Ram Sukumar built one that works across thirteen.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down withRam Sukumar, Director of Continuous Improvement for Hexpol Compounding Americas. Over the last six years, Ram has built and deployed the Hexpol Production System across 13 manufacturing plants in the US and Mexico, trained more than 1,100 employees across white, yellow, and green belt programs, and created a culture where CI is not a program that happens to employees but something they genuinely own. Ram is one of the most thoughtful and people-first CI leaders you will find anywhere in manufacturing today.

🔻 Why understanding the culture of a plant before you push a system into it is the difference between adoption and resistance

🔻 How Hexpol built a four-level belt program that starts with leadership training

🔻 How to standardize metrics across 13 plants so every managing director is learning from every other plant in real time

🔻 Why conflicting priorities kill more CI programs than lack of tools and how Hoshin planning finally solved it for Hexpol

🔻 How to scale AI into your operations without rushing in before your data and your people are ready

🔻 Why improvement is not an event or a program and what it looks like when your CEO believes that too

🔗 Connect with Ram Sukumar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramsukumar22/

🔗 Learn more about Hexpol: https://www.hexpol.com/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

What if the biggest barrier to improvement in your organization is not the process, the tools, or even the data? What if it is the way people see the problem in the first place?

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris welcomes back Keshawn Cupid, founder of Modern Kaizen and a lean and operational excellence expert on the cutting edge of human-centered AI transformation. Keshawn works with organizations across manufacturing, consulting, and professional development, and brings a rare combination of emotional intelligence, lean rigor, and practical AI implementation to every engagement. His approach starts not with tools but with mindset and he has written two books on exactly that.

🔻 Why a growth mindset is the only mindset that makes AI adoption actually work

🔻 How to introduce lean to a skeptical team without ever saying the word lean

🔻 Why the absence of reported problems is never the same as the absence of real problems

🔻 How to ask "what changed?" instead of "what is wrong?" and immediately get better answers

🔻 Why on-time delivery is one of the most manipulated metrics in manufacturing and what to measure instead

🔻 How to use AI as a thought partner to challenge your assumptions before you commit to a strategy

🔻 Why repeatable and rule-based processes are the first ones you should be targeting with AI

🔻 What emotional intelligence has to do with whether your lean transformation actually sticks

📚 Making the Transition: Inward to Outward Mindset by Keshawn Cupid: https://a.co/d/068Xgklf

📚 The Synergy Mindset by Keshawn Cupid: https://a.co/d/0b9299fF

🌐 Modern Kaizen: https://www.modernkaizen.com

🌐 Kaizen Edge X: https://kaizenedgex.co

🌐 MK Train X: https://mktrainx.co

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

What does it actually take to build a business you love running for 25 years without burning out, selling out, or losing yourself in the process?

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Alan Lucien, co-founder of EZ Process Pro, the ERP platform purpose-built for furniture and mattress retailers. Twenty-five years ago, Alan and his wife Jill could not find software that understood their family furniture business, so they built their own. That software now powers over 1,000 stores across the country, processes billions of dollars in annual furniture sales, and helped one customer scale from four showrooms to over 200 before selling for a billion dollars.

🔻 Why the two most important jobs of any leader have nothing to do with being the smartest person in the room

🔻 How to hire for core values instead of just skills so you never have to manage a cancer in your culture

🔻 Why every question someone brings you is a sign you are the bottleneck and what to do about it

🔻 How to run a weekly meeting that people actually want to show up to, including the push-up rule

🔻 How to set quarterly rocks that are objective, measurable, and do not blow up when life gets in the way

🔻 Why Alan asks "is that true?" before every major decision and what Navy SEALs taught him about honesty

🔗 Connect with Alan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-lucien-9a633b9/

🔗 Learn more about EZ Process Pro: https://www.ezprocesspro.com/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

If AI is so powerful, why are most companies not getting results from it? The answer has everything to do with whether you are solving the right problem.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Dr. Alan Barnard, CEO of Goldratt Research Labs, decision scientist, and one of the world's leading experts in theory of constraints. Alan co-founded Goldratt Research Labs with Dr. Eli Goldratt, the creator of theory of constraints, and has spent decades helping organizations apply systems thinking to everything from supply chains to healthcare to AI adoption.

🔻 Why AI applied to the wrong bottleneck produces zero improvement no matter how powerful it is

🔻 How to tell in one question whether you have a doing bottleneck or a waiting bottleneck

🔻 Why intentionally creating a bottleneck can actually increase the overall output of your system

🔻 How to go from assembler to architect in the way you use AI so you stop being the constraint

🔻 Why outcome prompting beats method prompting and what context and constraints you have to give AI to get useful answers

🔻 How our emotions evolved as a decision making hack and why AI may need to develop something similar

🔻 How theory of constraints applies to your own health, energy, and the way your mitochondria functions

🔗 Connect with Dr. Alan Barnard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dralanbarnard/

🌐 Books, white papers, and resources: https://www.standontheirshoulders.com/

🌐 Eternity Health: https://www.eternityhealth.ai/

🌐 Goldratt Research Labs: https://www.goldrattresearchlabs.com/

🌐 Harmony Apps: https://www.harmonyapps.com/

🌐 Dr. Alan Barnard: https://www.dralanbarnard.com/

🌐 Coaching with Dr. Alan: https://coaching.dralanbarnard.com/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

Most organizations treat continuous improvement like a project. The ones that actually get results treat it like a culture.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with David Norris. David Norris is the founder of Elevated Strategic Solutions, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations unlock capacity, improve performance, and align strategy with execution through operational excellence, continuous improvement, and data-driven decision-making.

🔻 Why improvement that skips the people always reverts the moment something goes wrong

🔻 How to use new employee onboarding to plant a CI mindset before old habits take hold

🔻 Why "we don't have time for this" is the single best signal that improvement is overdue

🔻 How to turn a budget request into a CI conversation before a single dollar gets approved

🔻 Why tracking both direct and indirect costs is where the real savings are hiding

🔻 Why CI and finance need to be working together if you want leadership to actually buy in

🔗 Connect with David Norris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-norris-17016b146/

🌐 Learn more at Elevated Strategic Solutions: http://elevatedmtnsolutions.com/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

Most companies chasing a big growth target are solving the wrong problem. And the real constraint is usually hiding in plain sight.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with John Hetherington, founder of We Deliver Your Vision and a process optimization consultant with more than 25 years of experience helping CFOs and COOs turn ambitious boardroom targets into measurable operational results. John started his career at Deloitte and Ernst and Young, leading large-scale finance transformation programs before building his own firm around one simple idea: find the single constraint holding your operation back, remove it, and prove the business result actually improved.

🔻 Why the first thing a company thinks is broken almost never is the real constraint

🔻 Why automating a bad process with AI just helps you fail faster at larger scale

🔻 How to use three metrics instead of ten to actually hit your growth target

🔻 How to apply the three R's to decide whether a process is actually ready for AI

🔻 Why asking "how are you feeling about this?" is one of the most powerful questions in operations

🔻 How to manage AI like a new hire instead of handing it the keys to everything at once

💬 Comment "flow" on this episode to receive John's free five-step production flow framework for assessing your constraint and growth targets.

🔗 Connect with John Hetherington on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhetherington1/

🌐 Learn more at We Deliver Your Vision: https://www.wedeliveryourvision.com/

🎥 Watch John on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHetherington.channel

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

What can a steel shipping container teach us about artificial intelligence? More than you would think.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Marc Levinson, historian, economist, and author of The Box, the definitive history of the shipping container. Marc formerly served as finance and economics editor at The Economist, an economist at JP Morgan Chase, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

🔻 Why standardization is the hardest problem in any major innovation and how the container finally solved it

🔻 How a single change in how goods move can hollow out entire cities and create entirely new industries in places nobody expected

🔻 What Malcolm McLean's biggest wins and biggest losses teach us about betting on new technology

🔻 How to think about the jobs AI will displace before assuming everyone will simply adjust

🔻 Why the countries that handled the shift best had one thing in common that the US largely did not

🔻 What individuals working in disrupted industries can do right now to stay ahead of the wave

🔗 Learn more about Marc Levinson and his books: https://www.marclevinson.net/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

The fires showing up in your business every week are not bad luck. They are a signal that something in your operations is broken underneath the surface.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Jhana Li, founder of Spyglass Ops, a firm that has pioneered the operator placement model, embedding a fractional COO directly into a business while the search for a permanent hire is underway. Jhana has been a COO for two startups, an operations coach for hundreds of founders, and has built one of the most practical and no-nonsense frameworks for how growing companies should think about the operations function, from the first ops hire all the way through to a fully scaled team.

🔻 Why every recurring fire in your business is data, not a crisis, and what it is actually telling you

🔻 How to know whether an operations problem is a systems issue or a people issue

🔻 Why managing to outcomes instead of inputs is what unlocks real team autonomy and AI adoption

🔻 How to build a job scorecard that works for hiring, onboarding, and performance all at once

🔻 Why really good operations looks like nothing and how to advocate for it anyway

🔻 How to tell the difference between an ops manager, a director of ops, and a COO so you hire the right level

🔻 Why AI layered onto broken systems just helps you sprint faster in the wrong direction

🔻 How to democratize SOP ownership so documentation never falls behind again

🔗 Connect with Jhana Li on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhana-li/

🎥 Follow Jhana on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theJhanaLi

📱 Follow Jhana on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejhanali/

🔗 Learn more about Spyglass Ops: https://bit.ly/4ftmOFR

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

Most leaders blame the person. The real problem is almost always the system.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Matt Yearsley, founder of Operational Excellence Advisors and a manufacturing and operations leader with more than 25 years of experience. Matt helps growing companies move beyond firefighting by building the systems, standards, and people development practices that let good employees actually succeed.

🔻 Why "hold them accountable" is meaningless without a documented standard to point to

🔻 How to know in three questions whether a failure belongs to the employee or to you as a leader

🔻 How to use a one-on-one to keep standards alive instead of letting them collect dust on a shelf

🔻 How to turn a chronic complainer or a troublemaker into your best problem solver

🔻 Why busy is not the same as productive, and how to tell the difference

🔻 How to define what winning looks like for jobs where success is hard to measure

🔗 Connect with Matt Yearsley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-yearsley-0317b0/

🔗 Learn more about Operational Excellence Advisors: https://opex-advisors.com/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

What does it actually look like inside Toyota, and why do so many companies get lean so wrong when they try to follow it?

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Darril Wilburn, senior partner at Honsha and a respected teacher, coach, and thought leader in lean leadership and the Toyota Way. He is co-author of the upcoming book Courage, Humility, Kaizen: The Leadership DNA of The Toyota Way.

🔻 Why 5S without connecting it to the work almost always fades within a year

🔻 What Western leaders get wrong when they try to adopt the Toyota Way

🔻 How Nemawashi is about preparing the soil, not just getting buy-in

🔻 How to tell the story of your CI function

🔻 Why great organizations put work to people instead of people to work

🔗 Connect with Darril Wilburn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrilwilburn/

🔗 Learn more at Darril's website: https://www.honsha.org

🔗 Learn more about Honsha: https://honsha.org/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

What if the biggest obstacle to fixing your business isn't the problem itself, but the way you're talking about it?

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Lee Campe, Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, consultant, educator, and U.S. Army Ranger School graduate. With over 10,000 people trained across industries, Lee makes the case that Lean Six Sigma is not a quality program or a variation reduction tool. It is structured problem solving, and everyone from machine operators to senior executives can use it.

🔻 Why Lean Six Sigma is problem solving first and process improvement second

🔻 Why executives jump to solutions and root causes before they even define the problem

🔻 The difference between hard and soft savings and why it matters for project credibility

🔻 How to tell if your X's actually predict your Y's before spending millions on the wrong fix

🔻 Why the art of storytelling is the most underrated skill in continuous improvement

🔻 How to use the define, measure, analyze, improve, and control phases to build a narrative that moves leadership to act

🔗 Connect with Lee Campe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leecampe/

📘 Buy Lee's Book: 'Lean Six Sigma: Defined correctly': https://a.co/d/0fuTv7cB

🔗 Visit Lee's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@leecampe1407

🔗 Visit Lee's Website: http://www.leecampe.com

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

What if most of your communication breakdowns and personality conflicts aren't people problems at all?

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Tom Foster, author, speaker, and longtime business coach to CEOs and senior leaders. Drawing on more than two decades of work with executive peer groups and 800+ deliveries of his organizational structure workshop, Tom makes the case that accountability starts with structure.

🔻 Why communication breakdowns and personality conflicts are almost always structural problems in disguise

🔻 The five organizational life cycle stages and the strategic focus that belongs to each one

🔻 Why delegation is not a time management tool but your most powerful mechanism for growing an organization

🔻 How levels of work and time span help you match the right people to the right decisions

🔻 Why breaking down silos is the wrong goal and what to do instead

🔻 Why hierarchy exists not for reporting but to bring value to problem solving and decision making

📘 Order Tom's Book, "Premeditated Culture": https://a.co/d/01ioDINF

🔗 Connect with Tom Foster: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fosterlearning/

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/

Lean has always been about working smarter. AI might be its most powerful tool yet.

In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Jennifer Ralston and Tina Agustiady for a practical conversation on where AI and continuous improvement intersect. Jennifer is the CEO and Founder of HKPO and the HKPO Veterans Academy. Tina is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, author, educator, and respected continuous improvement leader. Together, they make the case that structured problem-solving skills are more relevant than ever in an AI-driven world.

🔻 Why AI makes belt programs more powerful, not less relevant

🔻 How AI helps practitioners break through analysis paralysis in DMAIC projects

🔻 Real-world AI use cases across healthcare, finance, and manufacturing

🔻 Why you need domain expertise to prompt AI effectively

🔻 How to build AI adoption into organizational strategy and policy

🔻 What Dr. Deming's "knowledge of knowledge" tells us about AI transparency

🔻 How Lean Six Sigma certifications are impacting hiring and career advancement

🔗 Connect with Tina Agustiady on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tina-agustiady/

🔗 Connect with Jennifer Ralston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeralston/

📘 Sign up for free Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Training for Veterans: https://gohkpo.com/training/

🎟️ Register now for the online Webinar "AI & Lean" on August 19th, 2026: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-lean-tickets-1990425638666

🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/

🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/