Lou English has been a consultant and account manager with the Kaizen Institute since 1992. His major focus is the impact of culture, leadership and systems on Kaizen interventions both on the shop floor and in the office. Early on he found traditional Kaizen interventions too focused on the shop floor. Working with a design team he introduced new methods of applying Kaizen tools and technologies to information based businesses and support organizations like engineering, human resources, finance and purchasing. The results of these interventions have typically been a 50% reduction in defects, and a 30% improvement in backlog reduction and throughput.

Lou specializes in Leadership Development, Policy Deployment, Total Productive Maintenance, 5s, and Value Chain Analysis. He has both national and international experience working with companies like Ford, Robert Bosch, Multimatic, John Hancock, and Johnson Controls.

With over 22 years of consulting experience Lou knows what it takes to make Kaizen and lean technologies work and have a desired business impact. He knows how to work at all levels of the organization, and to develop an effective, sustainable change strategy. And he knows how to tailor these Kaizen technologies to improve the productivity, quality and responsiveness of service and information based businesses which are very different from material based, repetitive, short cycle time manufacturing processes.

Prior to working with Kaizen Institute Lou English was Director of Personnel for Cummins Engine Research center for three years. During that time he and his staff reduced grievance workload from 50 per month to 1. He also designed a streamlined process to hire 100 engineers, world wide, in 12 months. He led the revamping of Cummins apprentice program in terms of skills and diversity so it was later recognized internationally as one of the world’s best.

Prior to that position Lou was Director of Organizational Development for Cummins Engineering and Manufacturing for 10 years. While in this position he helped introduce the TQC and later Toyota Production System methods to seven local production plants. The result was three of these plants operations were moved into Assembly plant while business remained at record volumes. Later he was asked to introduce many of these same technologies to Engineering, reducing its design, development, testing throughput by 30%.

Lou earned a Masters and Ph.D. in Social Psychology and Organizational Development from SUNY at Buffalo in 1978. He and his wife, Ruth, live in Columbus, Indiana. When not working he enjoys, writing, computers, astronomy and sport motorcycles.