Tom Jackson, JD, MBA, PhDis 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 Revolutionfor 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 Prizefor his book, Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise .