Steven Spear

Steven Spear: Profile

Steven J. Spear is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and in MIT's Engineering Systems Division, and he is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. His book, The High Velocity Edge, has won numerous awards including the Philip Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) in 2011.

Spear is an internationally-recognized expert about leadership, innovation, and operational excellence, and he is an authority on how select companies—in high tech and heavy industry, design and production, manufacturing and services—generate unmatchable performance by converting improvement and innovation from the rare kiss of inspiration to repeatable, broad-based, skill-based disciplines.

Spear's research has been exceptionally well acknowledged with five Shingo Prizes and a McKinsey award from Harvard Business Review. Spear’s “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” and “Learning to Lead at Toyota,” are part of the lean manufacturing canon. His “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today” and articles in Annals of Internal Medicine and Academic Medicine have been on the forefront in health care improvement. He has contributed to the Boston Globe and New York Times, has appeared on Bloomberg TV and radio, CBS, and elsewhere.

At MIT, Spear teaches in the Leaders for Global Operations program and in Sloan School executive education custom programs and the open enrollment course, "Creating High Velocity Organizations," which is based on his research. Consulting clients have included well-known corporations like Intel, Lockheed Martin, Intuit, Novelis, Alcoa, and United Technologies, and he has worked hospitals such as Massachusetts General, Brigham Womens, and Memorial Sloan Kettering. At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, he is on a patient safety advisory board. He also a board member for the not-for-profit Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership and for the medical IT company Aceso.

Among other accomplishments, Spear helped the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative create its 'Perfecting Patient Care System.' That has been credited with eliminating horrible complications like central line infections and thereby improving care quality while reducing cost. The Alcoa Business System, which he helped design and launch, is regularly credited with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings. Other clients have dramatically compressed time and cost for marketing processes, new product development and software design.