Pittsburgh, Pa. -- Michael Hoseus, the co-author of Toyota Culture and former manager at Toyota's biggest manufacturing facility in North America, will be a featured speaker at the Printing Industries of America 2009 Continuous Improvement Conference taking place April 5-8 in Lexington, Kentucky.  

In his presentation, Building and Sustaining a Lean Culture the Toyota Way, Hoseus will reveal how Toyota selects, develops, and motivates its people to become committed to building high-quality products and how printing companies can do the same.

Hoseus was a corporate leader for 13 years in manufacturing and human relations at Toyota's Georgetown, Ky. plant. As assistant general manager in human resources, he helped Toyota create a culture that, at the time, was largely foreign to western thinking - that the right process includes input from others to generate consensus.

He currently is the executive director for the Center for Quality People & Organizations, an organization he developed in 1999 to share Toyota's Lean quality philosophy and human resource practices with education, business, and community organizations.  

"Companies around the world trying to implement Lean are asking the question 'what are we doing wrong?' They are wondering why their improvements are limited to a small group of people and why they are not sustained," said Hoseus. "They are missing a key component - the people."

His book Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way, co-authored with Jeffrey Liker, received praise when it was published in 2007. The book delves into the company's HR practices and related policies, showing how they support the company's four-stage process for building and keeping quality people: Attract, Develop, Engage, and Inspire.

In addition to this session, the 2009 Continuous Improvement Conference will feature Tuesday with Toyota - a tour of Toyota's plant in Georgetown, Ky. There attendees will see the most mature implementation of the Toyota Production System (TPS) outside of Japan (from which the Lean philosophy was derived).

The heart of the conference is the in-depth case studies of successful quality initiatives by a range of printing companies. Companies presenting case studies this year include: Beyer Printing, Japs-Olson, Monroe Litho, Outlook Group, Sheridan Books, Suttle-Straus, Branch Smith Printing, Transcontinental, CCL Label, and Valpak.

Additional information and registration for the 2009 Continuous Improvement Conference is available online at www.printing.org, Search: CI Conference, or by contacting Jeanette Tuttle-Hamer, conference manager, at 800-910-4283, ext. 712 or [email protected].