Tom Jackson, JD, MBA, PhD is the former CEO of Productivity, Inc. and Productivity Press and member of the influential Ford Lean Advisory Group. Tom has been a student of lean enterprise since 1988, when he copyedited Hiroyuki Hirano¿s JIT Factory Revolution for Productivity Press and reworked two chapters of Yasuhiro Monden¿s groundbreaking Japanese Management Accounting . Looking at pictures of Japanese factories and reading about how differently the Japanese count their money, Tom became so fanatical about lean that he left his comfortable position as a professor of business at the University of Vermont to start his own lean consulting company ¿ in Malaysia! There he learned that the powerful techniques of lean enterprise ¿ JIT, SMED, TPM, kanban, etc. ¿ ere only half the story of Toyota¿s great success. The other half of the story was hoshin kanri (aka the "balanced scorecard") and a revolution in the structure of modern business organization. In 2005, Tom started applying Toyota¿s operational and management methods in healthcare in a small rural clinic in Seward, Alaska. In 2008, Tom decided to trade his Levi Dockers for a pair of black scrubs and joined Mike Rona, former President of Seattle¿s Virginia Mason Medical Center, as a partner in the Rona Consulting Group, where he and Mike are "transforming healthcare and pursuing perfection.

" In 2007, Tom was awarded a Shingo Prize for his book, Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise .