Not Tom Polen of BD, otherwise known as Becton, Dickinson and Company, No. 211 on the Fortune 500. The company sells 35 billion devices a year ranging from hypodermic needles to advanced monitoring platforms. Polen talks about lean manufacturing with the same zeal that other CEOs talk about AI. He even shares the same sensei (master teacher) with Culp, Yukio Katahira. Polen became CEO in 2020, launching BD Excellence in 2024 to scale lean practices across the company, going from 50 kaizen projects to 1,500 last year. He argues that lean is a prerequisite for leveraging AI.
“If you’re not doing lean, do lean first,” he told me. “Get those systems and capabilities and then start applying AI on top of solid processes and systems. I’m 100% convinced that AI with lean is where you get the power.”
