Lean Whiskey Episode #26
Episode26: The accidental St. Patrick’s Day celebration, and exploring new CEO appointments Carol Tomé, Rosalind Brewer, and Jane Fraser
In Episode 26, we accidentally celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with some Irish whiskey, lightly mourn some NCAA March Madness losses, and Jamie Flinchbaugh and Mark Graban welcome guest co-host Adam Zak. We selected Irish whiskey as a category because we hadn’t used it yet, but after changing the date of the scheduled recording, we ended up quite close to St. Patrick’s Day (which was officially a dry holiday until 1970, but that pendulum certainly swung the other way). 
In the spirit of Adam Zak’s career as an executive recruiter with a lean lens, we discuss many of the new CEO appointments, in particular, Carol Tomé at UPS, Rosalind Brewer at Walgreens, and Jane Fraser at Citigroup. These appointments are historic in one sense, but also highlight the fact that only 41 of the Fortune 500 are run by women. We explore what matters when selecting a new CEO, how that fits the strategic needs of the company, and how lean thinking might influence or be leveraged by some of these leaders.
We explore a common listener question: Do you think it’s possible for a Lean organization to do well with quality and safety?
As we certainly don’t feel this question takes many nuances to answer, we make our way through this fairly quickly and on to our closing question about what books we are reading these days, with a slight detour into our reading habits.
- Adam Zak’s website, book Simple Excellence with Bill Waddell, and 2008 guest appearance on Mark’s LeanBlog podcast #105
- Adam’s whiskey selection, 18 YO Tullamore D.E.W.
- Jamie’s selection, Green Spot aged in zinfandel barrels from Chateau Montelena
- Mark’s selection, a special bottle of Teeling that he had a hand in, along with an honorable mention of Writers’ Tears
- A little about new UPS CEO Carol Tomé on Wikipedia and an interview
- A little something about new Walgreens CEO Rosalind Brewer on Wikipedia and Financial Times
- Stuff about new Citigroup CEO Jane Frasewr on Wikipedia and NYT
- Our collective reading list, Believe in People, The Girl Who Never Makes Mistakes, Constant Comedy, and Team of Rivals
- Podcast feed at LeanWhiskey.com or at leanblog.org/leanwhiskey or at jflinch.com/leanwhiskey
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