Dr. Steven Spear

Principal, HVE LLC
Sr. Lecturer, MIT Sloan School

Steven J. Spear is a Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. His book, The High Velocity Edge, has won 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 disciplines.

Spear's research has been acknowledged with five Shingo Prizes and a McKinsey award from Harvard Business Review. His “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 healthcare improvement. He's contributed to the Boston Globe and New York Times and has appeared on Bloomberg and CBS. Clients have included Intel, Lockheed Martin, Intuit, Novelis, Alcoa, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the US Army's Rapid Equipping Force, and the US Navy.

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.