Lean Blog Interviews — 426: John Gallagher, Lean and The Uncommon Leader

CEO of Growing Champions, LLC

Show notes: https://www.leanblog.org/426

My guest for Episode #426 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is John Gallagher, Founder and CEO of Growing Champions, LLC, an Executive Coach, Mentor, and Consultant. John was with Simpler Consulting for over a decade after being an operations manager and a division president for two different companies.

He’s also the host of a new podcast called The Uncommon Leader. I’ll be John’s guest in an episode to be released on October 19th.

Today, we talk about topics and questions including:

  • Where did you first get exposed to Lean?
  • Why were you skeptical about Lean at first?
  • Came from MRP batch & queue world
  • Rapid Improvement Event or Rapid Planning Event?
  • His first sensei, the late Bill Moffitt
  • “Comfort the afflicted or afflict the comforted?”
  • Who were some of your key mentors?
  • Lean Thinking was a key book, the first book he read on Lean
  • Being an operations manager vs. a division president… what did you learn from those roles?
  • Applying Lean to residential real estate sales
  • Healthcare? Patients aren’t cars?? Addressing that? Cookbook medicine?
  • “Unique care delivered in a standard way”
  • Tell us about the podcast…  inspired by Tony Dungy’s book
  • Who have been some of your guests? — Including Paul De Chant
  • Who are some of the “uncommon leaders” you have worked for, worked with, or coached? What made them uncommon?
  • Posts I was reminded of
  • Coaching work? Lean coach to exec coach?

The podcast is sponsored by Stiles Associates, now in their 30th year of business. They are the go-to Lean recruiting firm serving the manufacturing, private equity, and healthcare industries. Learn more.

This podcast is part of the #LeanCommunicators network