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
  • Lenny Walls, my trainer
  • Central Intelligence post
  • Sushi incrementalism post
• 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.