About KPI Fireside: A Continuous Improvement Podcast
KPI Fireside is the podcast for business leaders, process improvement professionals, and anyone passionate about making things better. Through insightful interviews with industry leaders, innovators, and changemakers, we explore the stories behind successful Continuous Improvement journeys.
Hosted by KPI Fire, this podcast dives deep into Lean Six Sigma, Strategy Execution, KPI Management, and Operational Excellence—helping you overcome obstacles and drive real impact in your organization.
Darril Wilburn & Hiro Yoshiki on Inside Toyota's Way
In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with returning guest Darril Wilburn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrilwilburn/), senior partner at Honsha, and first-time guest Hiro Yoshiki (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiroyoshi-yoshiki-619b86a0/), who spent 35 years at Toyota Motor Corporation before serving as president of Futaba Industrial, a major Toyota group supplier. Hiro worked on the site selection for Toyota's first wholly owned U.S. plant in Kentucky, helped create the Toyota Way 2001, and led the Kentucky plant's turnaround. Together, Hiro and Darril have co-authored Courage, Humility, Kaizen: The Three Disciplines of Toyota Culture.
🔻 Why so many companies implement TPS tools and still fail to sustain any of it
🔻 What courage actually means at Toyota and why setting a vision is one of the most courageous things a leader can do
🔻 How Genchi Genbutsu goes wrong when leaders show up with the answer already in their head
🔻 How Toyota's escalation model works so that problems get solved at the lowest possible level
🔻 Why the relentless pursuit of QCD is the true definition of TPS and everything else is just technique
🔻 What healthy paranoia means and why Hiro says he prefers it to any amount of recognition or celebration
🔻 How Hiro learned to never label people and why that became one of the most important lessons of his career
📚 Courage, Humility, Kaizen by Darril Wilburn and Hiro Yoshiki:https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Humility-Kaizen-Disciplines-Leadership/dp/B0HJP39WQH/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0#detailBullets_feature_div (https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Humility-Kaizen-Disciplines-Leadership/dp/B0HJP39WQH/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0#detailBullets_feature_div)
🌐 Learn more at Honsha: https://honsha.org/ (https://honsha.org/)
🌐 Japan Study Missions with Darril and Hiro: https://www.honsha.org/events/executive-development-mission-next-edition/ (https://www.honsha.org/events/executive-development-mission-next-edition/)
🔗 Connect with Darril Wilburn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrilwilburn/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrilwilburn/)
🔗 Connect with Hiro Yoshiki on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiroyoshi-yoshiki-619b86a0/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiroyoshi-yoshiki-619b86a0/)
🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/ (https://www.kpifire.com/)
🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/)
12 Oct 2026
Nick Katko on Continuous Improvement for Accounting
If your accounting team is buried in rework, chasing down missing approvals, and fixing the same invoice errors every month, the problem is not your people. It is your process.
In this episode of KPI Fireside, Keith Norris welcomes back Nick Katko (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickkatko/), the very first guest on the podcast, former CFO, lean accounting consultant, and author of multiple books on lean in finance. Nick's newest book is written specifically for accounting leaders who want to build a real continuous improvement system without having to become lean experts first.
🔻 How to apply PDCA in an accounting department without using a single piece of lean terminology
🔻 Why the four types of problems require four completely different responses and how to tell them apart
🔻 How a 43% invoice defect rate traced back to a flow problem nobody in accounting could see on their own
🔻 Why overtime is almost never a demand problem and what to measure instead to find the real cause
🔻 How the lean box score connects operational performance to financial performance in a way a spreadsheet never will
🔻 Why jumping to solutions before understanding root cause is the most common reason improvement events fail
🔻 What lean is really about, and why leaders who get that one thing right change everything
🔗 Connect with Nick Katko on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickkatko/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickkatko/)
📚 Nick's books: https://maskell.com/about/our-books/ (https://maskell.com/about/our-books/)
🌐 Accounting CI System book resources: https://www.accountingcisbook.com/ (https://www.accountingcisbook.com/)
🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/ (https://www.kpifire.com/)
🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/)
5 Oct 2026
Sylvie Fortier on Operational Excellence Everywhere
Most organizations try to execute before they have ever aligned on what problem they are actually solving. Sylvie Fortier has spent her career fixing that.
In this episode of KPI Fireside, host Keith Norris sits down with Sylvie Fortier (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylviefortier/), founder of Phoenix Praxis and a veteran of Motorola during the foundational years of Six Sigma. Sylvie has carried that early education across telecommunications, financial services, technology startups, and now ambulatory surgery centers, where she helps leaders strip away complexity, surface what actually matters, and build operating models that can scale without scaling the friction. Her philosophy is straightforward: operational excellence is not about making people work harder. It is about making the optimal outcome easier, more visible, and more repeatable.
🔻 Why execution can never compensate for strategic ambiguity and what to align on first
🔻 What Motorola taught Sylvie that most organizations never figure out about defects outside the manufacturing floor
🔻 Why scattered data creates the illusion of visibility without creating any real understanding
🔻 How to tell the difference between clinical resistance and a team telling you your process design has a flaw
🔻 Why co-design matters more than a perfect process handed down from the outside
🔗 Connect with Sylvie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylviefortier/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylviefortier/)
🌐 Phoenix Praxis: https://thePhoenixPraxis.com (https://thePhoenixPraxis.com) Home to the 42-Second Phoenix Pulse, a free diagnostic that instantly baselines your exposure to integration bottlenecks and leadership dependency risk in just seven critical questions.
🌐 The Clean Food Protocol: https://TheCleanFoodProtocol.com (https://TheCleanFoodProtocol.com) Systems thinking applied to food sourcing and consumer choice.
🔗 Learn more about KPI Fire: https://www.kpifire.com/ (https://www.kpifire.com/)
🎙 Hosted by Keith Norris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithnorris/)
Who has been a guest on KPI Fireside: A Continuous Improvement Podcast
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Keshawn Cupid
Alan Lucien
Dr Alan Barnard
David Norris
John Hetherington
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
6 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
9 ratings
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