Defining Winning: Turning Around Operations Through Clarity and Ownership with Billy Taylor

WLEI - Lean Enterprise Institute’s Podcast

In this episode of the WLEI podcast, LEI speaks with Billy Taylor, former operations executive at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. He is now President of LinkedXL and author of The Winning Link: a Proven Process to Define, Align, and Execute Strategy at Every Level.

In our discussion, we explore:

• Billy’s career journey from third shift supervisor to director of North American operations for Goodyear.
• How Billy led a transformation of one of Goodyear’s worst-performing plants through instituting a few core principles: deliberate clarity, defined ownership, deliberate practice, and trust.
• Billy’s approach to scaling a management system from a single plant to multiple plants across North America through intense collaboration with plant leaders.
• The current challenges of retaining employees due to changing workforce mindsets post-COVID and how to re-engage workers.