I’m Karyn Ross, author of How to Coach for Creativity and Service Excellence: A Lean Coaching Workbook, and coauthor of the Shingo Award-winning, The Toyota Way to Service Excellence: Lean Transformation in Service Organizations.
An internationally acclaimed consultant, coach and lean practitioner, I’ve taught organizations of all sizes, in sectors as diverse as insurance, HR, transportation and retail how to use creativity combined with Toyota Way principles, practices and tools. This powerful combination enables organizations to create better, more effective and efficient ways to work and the peak services that each of their customers wants, now and for the future.
While many other Lean consultants focus on implementing tools, I teach your team how to use Practical Creativity™ to continuously strive towards service excellence. By developing each person’s capability through Coached Practice, I focus on the means: the ‘how’, and not just the ‘ends’ or the results, because “how we get there is as important as where we are going”.
A practicing artist, with an MFA in Sculpture, I specialize in developing your team’s creativity and divergent thinking skills so that your organization can flourish, thrive and grow and fulfill it’s purpose.
The Toyota Way To Service Excellence

A Shingo prize-winning must-read for executives, managers, consultants and front-line workers, this essential book takes the proven Lean principles of the bestselling Toyota Way series and applies them directly to the industries where quality of service is crucial for success. Using the famous 4P model, Jeff Liker and Karyn Ross show you how to develop the Lean practices your organization needs to develop people and processes that surprise and delight each of your customers.
Fascinating case studies drawn from original research and real-world examples of Lean-driven success in a range of service industries, including healthcare, insurance, financial services, and telecommunications, illustrate that Lean principles and practices work as well in services as they do in manufacturing.
Purchase your copy by clicking here!
How to Coach for Creativity and Service Excellence
How to Coach for Creativity and Service Excellence: A Lean Coaching Workbook is a self-contained workbook, enabling the reader to complete twenty-one days of practical exercises and activities focused on creativity, lean and coaching (one set per day). This will enable the reader to develop their capability and confidence to be creative, adapt lean principles, practices and tools to their unique service organization and coach others to do the same. The workbook will guide the reader through a structured, systematic, easy-to-understand, habit-building approach, and function as the reader’s ‘coach’.
Written in a workbook style, each chapter contains a short section of theory (including examples drawn from a wide variety of service sectors), then exercises and activities that you will complete right in the workbook to turn theory into the practice that ensures real learning. As you ‘work’ your way through the book, you will reclaim your creativity, learn Karyn’s tried-and-true 15-minute a day coaching approach and adapt lean principles, practices and tools to your own particular organization.
Purchase your copy by clicking here!
Announcing my new book: The Kind Leader: A Practical Guide to Eliminating Fear, Creating Trust and Leading with Kindness!
Kindness and leadership aren’t often synonymous. Ask someone to describe “good leadership” and you will hear many adjectives: bold, challenging, charismatic, decisive, empowering, fearless, goal-oriented, humble, inspiring, strategic and transparent, to name of a few. And though there are many more that come to mind, kindness isn’t one of them. And here’s the problem with that. Leaders lead. And the way a leader leads – how they do what they do – influences those they lead. From the President of the country, to the president of a company, from middle managers, right down to front-line supervisors, what a leader models – how they think, speak and act – influences the people they lead. Leaders who think, speak and act unkindly give legitimacy and permission to those they lead to think, speak and act in exactly the same unkind ways. Today, in a world where a leaders’ words and actions travel quickly through social media channels, their influence – unkind or kind – is amplified through repeated views and sharing. In an increasingly fragmented, polarized and divided world, we need leaders who will bring people together not divide them. Leaders who value and model cooperation and collaboration over competition. And who model ways to think kindly, speak kindly and act kindly. We need kindness to become synonymous with good leadership.
Purchase your copy by clicking here!
Have you signed up for Kind Leadership Week yet? We’ll be celebrating Kind Leadership and the book’s publication from September 13 – 17, 2021 and we’d love you to join us! Download the Kind Leadership Week Calendar of Events here!
For more about Kind Leadership, and to register for The New School for Kind Leaders courses, workshops, experiences and events, please visit our website at www.kindleadership.org
Royalties from all book sales go directly to support Karyn’s public charity, The Love and Kindness Project Foundation.
Who We Are August 15th, 2021karynross