Charting the Path to an AI-Native Operation

Most companies are experimenting with agents. Few can say where it's going. Chris Bradley argues that the missing piece isn't better technology — it's direction, and a method for drawing the road from the work itself.

The episode opens on hoshin kanri, the Japanese practice documented by Bridgestone in 1965: leadership sets a fixed direction, and the people closest to the work discover the path. Lean calls that direction True North, and distinguishes two speeds of moving toward it — kaizen, continuous improvement, and kaikaku, radical change.

Bradley defines AI-native plainly: agents do the routine work end to end, and people spend their time on the decisions only people should make. He then shows how Veritiv is charting that path for open orders ahead of its next Kaizen. The team asked every open order why it hadn't moved and found that none of the stops raised an alarm, named an owner, or started a clock. The customer was the alarm. From there: a daily list for each person that doubles as the agent roadmap, three stages organized around who types and who decides, and a rule that no stage is reached by date — only by evidence.

He is clear that the future stages are a proposal, not a result. The episode closes with a five-step method listeners can apply to their own processes, and a distinction worth keeping: kaikaku describes how far you're going, and kaizen is how you get there.

Part of the Lean AI arc — following Kaizen + Agentic AI, The Nine Wastes of AI, Jidoka for Agents, and AI Standard Work.