George Trachilis shares his personal and professional journey to becoming a global Lean coach and leader. You will learn about his commitment towards building people to their fullest potential. George offers his insight into overcoming leadership and organizational challenges by building a culture of continuous improvement. He challenges attendees to think deeply about what *one* thing they are striving to achieve, and to remember that the driving force for any improvement effort must be aligned to a True North focused on adding value to the customer. He also shares the five steps of the lean leadership development model discovered by Jeffrey K. Liker. One of those five steps is committing to self development. George shares how the Harada method discovered by Norman Bodek (1932-2020) is the best system in the world for day-to-day management. Shohei Ohtani (a.k.a. Showtime) used the Harada method as a sophomore in Japan, he is now the best baseball player in the world.

Stuart MacDonald has a refreshing look at how to approach continuous improvement. He explains how he stumbled into the Lean culture at his former employer (a fortune 200 company). It trained their employees with mandatory classes that were incredibly immersive. This led Stuart to rethink his hobby, performing magic. He proposed a question to himself, “how can I apply Lean and CI to my magic and how far will that take me?” It took him pretty far. He went from a part-time, local magician to successfully competing on the Penn and Teller Fool Us TV show, representing the U.S. at the World Championships of Magic, winning the North American Championships of Magic, and quitting his job to go on a world tour. Stuart guides the audience through a journey of discovery, failure and amazing success. He’ll also amaze attendees by performing the magic that fooled Penn & Teller.

The IC Group, a provider of print and marketing solutions, has been harnessing the power of continuous improvement and technical innovation to reduce waste, meet stringent service requirements, and focus on customer-defined value. Many Lean tools are in use, and the latest to be introduced—daily Gemba walks—have proven effective in improving team communications and solving problems before they snowball and impact customers. Hear about the progress and challenges as IC Group continues its Lean journey through the pandemic.

It’s easy to believe that to be a great leader you have to be the expert in the room with all the answers. But what if that belief was not true? Many managers are good at solving problems. The problem is that they solve problems for others rather than developing the capability of team members to solve their own problems, and burdens the manager with the ownership of all the problems. Leaders need to learn to break their telling habit in order to solve more problems and engage their people. Doing so requires asking questions from a place of curiosity to learn what a team member is thinking, not to lead them to your answer. Leaders also need to be aware of the words they use and how they could be received. Discover practices that can change your behavior to encourage critical thinking skills in others, solve more problems, and amplify your impact.

Despite a desire for high performance, few organizations in our industry excel at fostering the culture required to achieve it. Communication may not be open and consistent, corporate values and goals unclear, team spirit lacking, individuals not empowered to make decisions, and systematic training and development ignored. Learn how to avoid those pitfalls by hearing SeaChange’s story. The commercial printing company has been passionate about taking purposeful steps to create a culture that has allowed it to be recognized as one of the best workplaces, but also to grow at an impressive rate and stay at the forefront of print and emerging technologies.