Wiring the Winning Organization with Dr. Steve Spear

Dr. Steven J. Spear (DBA MS MS)

Principal, HVE LLC

Sr. Lecturer, MIT Sloan School

Sr. Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Creator, See to Solve Gemba and Real Time Alert Systems

SSpear@MIT.edu www.SeeToSolve.com Steve@HVELLC.com

Knowing how to get smarter about what you do and better at doing it, faster than

anyone else, is critical, a bona fide source of sustainable competitive advantage.

How so? All organizations share a challenge. They’re trying to coordinate people—

sometimes a few, sometimes many thousands—towards shared purpose, somewhere

on the spectrum from upstream conceptualization and discovery, through

development, design, and ultimately delivery. The problem is, particularly at the start

of any undertaking, no one really knows what to do, how to do it, nor can they do it

well. All that has to be invented, created, discovered…figured out.

So, those who solve problems faster, win more. After all, if your team and mine chase similar goals (or we face

off as adversaries), you succeed (or win) because you come to your moments of test better prepared than I do.

Since knowhow and skills are not innate, you won because you solved your problems, better and faster than I did

mine, gaining edges in relevance, reliability, resilience, and agility.

Spear’s work focuses on the theme of leading complex collaborative situations, imbuing them with powerful

problem solving dynamics. The High Velocity Edge earned the Crosby Medal from ASQ. “Fixing Healthcare from

the Inside” won a Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award, and five of Spear’s articles won Shingo Prizes.

“Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” is a leading HBR reprint and part of the “lean” canon. He’s

written for medical professionals and educators in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, and Health

Services Research, for public school superintendents in Academic Administrator, and for the general public in the

New York Times, the Boston Globe, Fortune, and USA Today.

High velocity learning concepts have been tested in practice, helping building internal capability for accelerated

improvement and innovation at Alcoa—which generated recurring savings in the $100s of millions, Beth Israel

Deaconess, a pharma company—with compressions by half in a key drug development phase, Intel, Intuit,

Pittsburgh hospitals, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Mass General, Novartis, Pratt and Whitney—which won the F-35

engine contract with its pilot, DTE Energy, US Synthetic, and the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force. The Chief of

Naval Operations made high velocity learning a service wide initiative, and Spear was one of a few outside advisors

to the Navy’s internal review of 2017’s Pacific collisions. He was also an advisor to Newport News Shipbuilding

bout introducing innovative systems on the Gerald Ford, the first in a new generation of aircraft carriers. The See

to Solve suite of apps has been developed to support introducing and sustaining high velocity learning behaviors.

At MIT, Spear teaches Leaders for Global Operations and Executive Education students, has advised dozens of

theses, and is principal investigator for research titled “Making Critical Decisions with Hostile Data.” Spear’s work

history includes Prudential-Bache Capital Funding, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, the LongTerm Credit Bank of Japan, and the University of Tokyo. His doctorate is from Harvard, his masters in mechanicalengineering and in management are from MIT, and he majored in economics, at Princeton, to earn his bachelors.

Spear lives in Brookline with his wife Miriam, an architect, and their three children, where he is on the board of

the Maimonides School.

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