ReachMD

Steven Spear, DBA, MS, MS Senior Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement Steven Spear has written extensively about how exceptional organizations create competitive advantage through the strength of their internal operations, managing complex design, production, and administrative processes for unmatched performance. His first book, Chasing the Rabbit, will be published by McGraw Hill in Fall 2008. As for his articles, Spear's “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today,” won a McKinsey Award as one of the best Harvard Business Review articles in 2005 and his fourth Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research. He has published in Annals of Internal Medicine and other medical journals as well. Spear works actively with a variety of organizations. He played an integral role in developing the Alcoa Business System, which has been credited with saving hundreds of millions of dollars in Alcoa's annual report, and the Perfecting Patient Care program of the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative, which helped raise quality and safety of care in area hospitals. He has worked with organizations such as Lockheed Martin, John Deere, Intel, Intuit, Brigham Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He consulted for the MacArthur Foundation, and works with Toyota on supplier development efforts. At MIT, he teaches a course about lean manufacturing and six sigma in the Leaders for Manufacturing Program. Spear’s academic degrees include a doctorate from Harvard Business School, masters degrees – in management and mechanical engineering – from MIT, and a bachelors degree in economics from Princeton. He worked for the investment bank Prudential-Bache, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, and the University of Tokyo, and he taught at Harvard Business School for six years. He and his wife, Miriam, an architect, live in Brookline MA with their three children. Publications Chasing the Rabbit: Why the World's Greatest Organizations Outrace Their Competition, McGraw Hill, expected Fall 2008. “Better Care for More People at Better Cost,” with Don Berwick, Boston Globe, op-ed, November 2007. “Learning from the Masters: By adopting complex processes from Toyota and Alcoa, hospitals can improve performance,” Cerner Quarterly, (2006). “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside: Teaching Residents to Heal Broken Delivery Processes As They Heal Sick Patients,” Research and Innovation in Medical Education Invited Address, American Association of Medical Colleges Annual conference. Academic Medicine. 81(10) Suppl:S144-S149, (2006). “Using Real-Time Problem Solving to Eliminate Central Line Infections,” with Richard Shannon and other co-authors. Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. 32:479-487, (2006). “Operational Failures and Interruptions in Hospital Nursing Work,” with Anita Tucker, Health Services Research, (2006). “The Health Factory,” New York Times [op ed], (2005). (#) (*) “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today,” Harvard Business Review (2005). “Ambiguity and Workarounds as Contributors to Medical Error,” with Mark Schmidhofer, Annals of Internal Medicine (2005). “Medical Education as a Process Management Problem,” with Elizabeth Armstrong and Marie Mackey, Academic Medicine (2004). (*) “Learning to Lead at Toyota,” Harvard Business Review, (2004) “Driving Improvement in Patient Care,” with Debra Thompson and Gail Wolf, Journal of Nursing Administration (2003). (*) “The Essence of Just in Time,” Productivity, Planning, and Control, (2002). (x) “When Problem Solving Prevents Organizational Learning,” with Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson, Journal of Organizational Change Management, (2002). (*) “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,” with H. Kent Bowen, Harvard Business Review, (1999). (#) McKinsey Award (*): Shingo Prize winning articles. (x): Best paper proceedings, Academy of Management conference, 2001.