Michelle: First off, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So, as you said, my name is Ben Linke. I'm the vice president of industrial products at Baker Hughes, which is a global energy and technology company in the industrial space as well. And like many in this industry, I started with a passion for solving complex problems, making systems work better. And over the past 21 years of my career, I've worked across oil and gas, health care, aerospace, and industrial manufacturing businesses.

Over time, I've led multi-million, a hundred-million-dollar businesses to a few-billion-dollar businesses today across services, manufacturing, software and engineered solutions. Now, my current goal in my current job is really to shape a portfolio of businesses that address mega trends like energy transition, industry productivity and digital automation.

Michelle: So, I know in the article, we get more details, but can you tell us a little bit about your Kaizen journey and how that came about?

Ben: I've personally used parts of the Kaizen principles for quite some time, also in various roles over my 21 year career. I did not always refer to them necessarily as Kaizen or did include the entire playbook, but it included many aspects of that.

Maybe just to give you an older example, especially when I was leading the subsea services and offshore business within Baker Hughes between 2017 and 21, I really saw the power of some of the Kaizen principles. Just a couple of examples was we focused on improving processes, making them more efficient and reduce waste. We drove a culture of improvement and empowered the organization to contribute with ideas. And we implemented an operating model that was based on leading indicators and clear root cause analysis.

And then, ultimately, we developed a strategic muscle around how could we differentiate the business in the future and not be dependent entirely on our install base. The outcome was quite significant as we improved the business, as the culture changed, as we focused more on process improvement, learning and ultimately winning. And it ended up in very significant financial improvement, but also in very, very positive employee and customer feedback.

Now, another example is really in my most recent role when I became the vice president of inspection in October 22. At the time we combined two businesses with seven sub-P&Ls into a larger business unit. At that time I had read a lot more about Kaizen and I followed several other companies who had gone through a similar journey.

And as part of that, I was able to learn really about the variety of the tools. And I think that the business that I came into was dabbling a little bit with Kaizen for a short period of time, but didn't necessarily have a long-lasting success. And so, when we saw some of the businesses that were underperforming, we really as a team decided to go all in on Kaizen. And we said that was the way to go.