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What if the reason your business isn't growing has nothing to do with efficiency — and everything to do with whether you are solving the right problems at all?
In Episode 219 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast, Brad Jeavons sits down with Gary Stewart — a former CEO of a Toyota Group company and one of Australia's most experienced systems thinkers — to explore one of the most important and misunderstood distinctions in organisational performance: effectiveness versus efficiency.
Gary brings decades of experience inside the Toyota system to this conversation, and he pulls no punches. While efficiency focuses on the producer — doing things with less waste — effectiveness focuses on the customer: solving the right problems, creating the right outcomes. Both matter, but most organisations are so obsessed with efficiency metrics that they are inadvertently destroying their own effectiveness — and often don't know it, because the metrics they are using are being gamed.
Gary shares two powerful case studies. The first involves a production manager claiming 103% efficiency — a mathematical impossibility that turned out to mask a true gross efficiency of just 50%. The second is a microbiology company on the verge of collapse that, by mapping its perfect system and systematically removing problems, errors, delays, and frustrations, reduced its project timeline from 116 weeks to just 26 weeks — and in the process solved science problems no one had ever solved, creating global patents and a new revenue stream. This is what effectiveness innovation looks like in practice.
The conversation also challenges some deeply held assumptions about Lean, describing it as fundamentally a 'watching the hands' method that can take organisations to 3 or 3.5 out of 10 on the perfect line — but never to 4. The shift required to go further is not a technical one; it is a human one. And that requires leaders to give up command and control in favour of a model that develops the human mind as its primary purpose.
Key topics covered in this episode:
• The difference between effectiveness innovation (customer-focused, revenue and profit) and efficiency innovation (producer-focused, working capital and cash flow)
• Campbell's Law: why manipulable targets always get gamed, and how to use absolute benchmarks to expose the truth
• The microbiology case study: from near-bankruptcy to global patents in three years
• The factory as a dojo: Toyota's philosophy that the purpose of work is to train the human mind
• Why Lean is a 'watching the hands' method — and why that limits it to 3 out of 10 on the perfect line
• Command and control vs the ascending spiral curve: what it really takes to build excellence
• The QA network: a practical tool for building frontline ownership of quality and system control
• How to start: study Russell Ackoff, map the perfect system, and teach people how their system fails
If you lead an organisation and you are serious about building something genuinely excellent — not just efficient — this episode will change how you think about performance, leadership, and people development.
Connect with Brad Jeavons: linkedin.com/in/bradjeavons/
Enterprise Excellence Group Podcast: buzzsprout.com/1120772/episodes/19266509
To learn more about what we do, visit https://eexg.com.au/
Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.
