Tom has over 30 years experience in helping leaders take traditional operations through a fundamental shift to world-class operations. He began this work in 1982 as an executive at Cummins Inc; he helped lead one of the first total system shifts in this U.S. In the late 80's he left Cummins and as a partner in the Kaizen Institute of America, he began delivering seminars around the country explaining the mind set shift required to be successful in the Toyota Production system.

Most of his consulting work was with the auto industry with Goodyear, Chrysler, Bosch, Caterpillar, Ford, and many of the auto suppliers. He also did early work to translate this manufacturing approach to administrative work, school and hospital systems.

The focus of his work is helping leaders and internal resources develop the competencies of long term systemic change. This includes the need for stability in focus, a culture of support and change, redesigned operating systems, and most importantly understanding work as a flow across functions.

This shift of thinking begins within the leadership, and over time is coached into the work force as real time changes are implemented. Much of this is portrayed in his book “The Way of Quality” that captures the shift from a reactive, crisis mind set to the process/system mind set of world-class operations.

Tom continues to write and occasionally teaches about the underlying thinking process required to not only manage an operation with high quality and little waste, but also to live it in all aspects of life.