People

Taiichi Ohno built the Toyota Production System — the operating framework that transformed manufacturing and became the foundation for lean thinking, Six Sigma, and virtually every process improvement methodology that followed. He was also, by all accounts, a brutal teacher....

In 1996, a biologist named Stuart Kauffman published a theory about how complex systems — cells, ecosystems, economies — organize themselves. His central finding: the most adaptive, highest-performing systems do not operate in perfect order. They do not operate in...

Ram Charan has advised GE, DuPont, Novartis, Home Depot, and Verizon. He spent 35 years as one of the world's foremost leadership consultants, on the road 365 days a year, inside the organizations that define how business gets done at...

In 2002, Larry Bossidy — the man who turned AlliedSignal into a reliable earnings machine and then came back to rescue Honeywell — published a book called Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. He spent the better part of his...