KPI Fireside: A Continuous Improvement Podcast

KPI Fire
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Management
  • Updated Weekly

KPI Fireside is the podcast for business leaders, process improvement professionals, and anyone passionate about making things better. Through insightful interviews with industry leaders, innovators, and changemakers, we explore the stories behind successful Continuous Improvement journeys. Hosted by KPI Fire, this podcast dives deep into Lean Six Sigma, Strategy Execution, KPI Management, and Operational Excellence—helping you overcome obstacles and drive real impact in your organization.

  1. 5d ago

    Darril Wilburn & Hiro Yoshiki on Inside Toyota's Way

    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/

    Darril Wilburn & Hiro Yoshiki on Inside Toyota's Way

  2. Oct 12

    Nick Katko on Continuous Improvement for Accounting

    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/

    Nick Katko on Continuous Improvement for Accounting

  3. Oct 5

    Sylvie Fortier on Operational Excellence Everywhere

    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/

    Sylvie Fortier on Operational Excellence Everywhere

  4. Sep 28

    Catherine McDonald on AI, Leadership, and Collaboration

    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/

    Catherine McDonald on AI, Leadership, and Collaboration

  5. Sep 21

    Jonathan Lewis on The New Story of Work

    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/

    Jonathan Lewis on The New Story of Work

  6. Sep 14

    Ram Sukumar on Scaling Continuous Improvement Across 13 Manufacturing Plants

    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 with Ram 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/

    Ram Sukumar on Scaling Continuous Improvement Across 13 Manufacturing Plants

  7. Sep 7

    Keshawn Cupid on The Next Generation of Continuous Improvement

    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/

    Keshawn Cupid on The Next Generation of Continuous Improvement

  8. Aug 31

    Alan Lucien on Building a High Performance Team

    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/

    Alan Lucien on Building a High Performance Team
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5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

KPI Fireside is the podcast for business leaders, process improvement professionals, and anyone passionate about making things better. Through insightful interviews with industry leaders, innovators, and changemakers, we explore the stories behind successful Continuous Improvement journeys. Hosted by KPI Fire, this podcast dives deep into Lean Six Sigma, Strategy Execution, KPI Management, and Operational Excellence—helping you overcome obstacles and drive real impact in your organization.

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