Welcome to The Management Brief — a weekly newsletter from the Lean Enterprise Institute delivering actionable insights, strategies, and stories on lean management. Each issue explores proven methods like hoshin kanri for strategic alignment, A3 problem-solving, and daily management that foster stability, improvement, and innovation. We aim to help you build resilient, high-performing organizations prepared for long-term success. Subscribe for free and join a community dedicated to management excellence.
In this edition of The Management Brief, LEI President Josh Howell sat down with Charlie Murphy, Senior Vice President at Turner Construction, to discuss the company’s remarkable lean transformation journey. Charlie shares how the organization leveraged core lean principles and practices to drive a dramatic improvement in safety performance and build a culture of continuous improvement.
Key takeaways include:
- Turner’s safety performance improvement, from a recordable incident rate of 5 per 200,000-man hours down to under 1, driven by fact-based problem-solving and a rigorous management system.
- Building problem-solving capability and implementing hoshin kanri connected high-level priorities to daily problem-solving and operational improvements.
- The shift from “relentless” to “co-learning” safety incident reviews fostered a more collaborative, fact-based approach to addressing safety issues.
- Standardizing daily management systems and empowering middle managers were critical steps in scaling lean practices across Turner’s 1,500 active projects.
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