Planet Lean: The Official online magazine of the Lean Global Network
What Toyota and the Green Berets have in common

What Toyota and the Green Berets have in common

Sam MacPherson
April 9, 2015

INTERVIEW - What do the United States Army’s Special Forces unit and Toyota have in common? To find out, we spoke to the Green Berets’ former Director of Training at the LEI summit in New Orleans.


Interviewee: Sam MacPherson, Lean Enterprise Transformation Leader at the Lean Leadership Academy and former Director of Training of the United States Army’s Special Forces unit.



THE INTERVIEWEE

Sam MacPherson photograph
Sam MacPherson is a lean enterprise transformation leader and has dedicated over 28 years to developing organizational leaders, senior leadership teams, and designing lean enterprise management systems

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Overcoming a kanban system’s scalability problems with digitalization
June 19, 2025
Overcoming a kanban system’s scalability problems with digitalization

CASE STUDY – Italian company El.Co. leveraged digitalization to overcome some key limitations of its manual kanban system while maintaining its pull system intact.

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With digital, lean finally reaches CEOs
November 6, 2018
With digital, lean finally reaches CEOs

INTERVIEW – At last month’s Lean Digital Summit in Lisbon, César Gon told attendees how, with lean digital, we have an opportunity to finally get the attention of CEOs and business leaders.

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Ian Glenday’s guide to starting levelled production
June 16, 2016
Ian Glenday’s guide to starting levelled production

FEATURE – In the latest article of his series for Planet Lean, Ian Glenday explains the practical steps an organization can take to properly introduce levelled production in its operations.

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Models for thinking about Lean Thinking
May 30, 2024
Models for thinking about Lean Thinking

FEATURE - The Basic Thinking dimension of the Lean Transformation Framework is often the most neglected and the least understood. The author tries to shed a light on the subject.

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