When Mithun Ramachandran became President of nVenia, he faced a challenge familiar to many first-time CEOs and presidents: How do you create change without pretending you already have all the answers?

The pressure on new leaders is enormous. Move fast. Make decisions. Prove yourself.

Instead, Mithun chose a different path.

He listened.

Before launching initiatives. Before reorganizing teams. Before declaring what needed to change.

He visited customers. He spoke with more than 70 associates. He studied the work. He focused on understanding the business before trying to transform it.

What he discovered was surprising:

Customers and employees were often describing the same problems from opposite sides of the same system.

In Episode 12 of the Lean Focus Podcast, Damon Baker sits down with Mithun to discuss the lessons learned during his first year as a president, why curiosity can be a competitive advantage, and how organizations move from firefighting and heroics to trust, discipline, and predictability.

In this conversation, Mithun shares:

• What he learned from customers and frontline associates during his first months as president
• Why customer pain and employee pain are often symptoms of the same underlying system
• How a first-time leader earns credibility without having all the answers
• Why "embracing the red" became an important cultural shift for the organization
• The role of a strong say/do ratio in building trust and accountability
• How leaders create urgency without creating fear
• Why sustainable performance comes from improving systems rather than demanding more effort

Mithun also shares one of the most important leadership lessons from his journey:

"Don't walk in as the hero. Walk in as a student of the system."

This episode is a masterclass in leadership humility, operational discipline, and the courage to listen before acting.

Because great leaders don't build organizations that depend on heroes.

They build systems that allow ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results.

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Envista didn't start from scratch.

The company was born out of Danaher.

The tools were there.

The playbook was there.

The talent was there.

And that's what makes this story so fascinating.

In Episode 11 of the Lean Focus Podcast, Damon Baker sits down with Brian Huh, Vice President of the Envista Business System Office, to explore what happens when a company that deeply understands Lean slowly drifts away from the discipline that made it successful.

Coming out of COVID, Envista had momentum. Strong growth. Strong EBITDA. Confidence.

Then the dental market softened.

Performance started slipping.

Priorities multiplied.

Focus disappeared.

And leadership realized something difficult:

The problem wasn't that the organization didn't know Lean.

The problem was that it had stopped truly operating that way.

In this conversation, Brian shares how Envista reignited its business system and rebuilt operational discipline across the company:

• Why "working on too many things" quietly destroys performance
• How organizations drift even when they have world-class Lean heritage
• The power of CEO Kaizens to reset culture and leadership behavior
• Why communication is one of the most underestimated tools in transformation
• How President Kaizens and localized problem solving accelerated momentum
• Why leadership ownership determines whether Lean survives or dies
• How Envista rebuilt focus around the critical few priorities that truly mattered

Brian also explains the deeper shift that occurred:

EBS stopped being something the organization "did"… and became the way the company operates every day.

This episode is a powerful reminder that Lean is not self-sustaining.

Even great organizations drift.

Even strong cultures lose focus.

Even companies with the best business system heritage in the world must recommit themselves to operational discipline.

Because knowing Lean works is not enough.

You have to choose it — over and over again.

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Fluke didn't have a performance problem.

It had a future problem.

In Episode 10 of the Lean Focus Podcast, Damon Baker sits down with Wes Pringle, CEO of Evident Scientific, to unpack how one of the most respected industrial brands in the world made a high-stakes decision: reinvent the business while it was still winning.

At the time, Fluke was the clear leader in handheld industrial test tools.
Trusted brand. Dominant market share. World-class hardware.

But the world was changing.

Industrial environments were becoming more automated.
Fewer technicians. More connected systems.
The value was shifting — from the tool… to the data behind the tool.

Fluke had a choice:

Protect the core that made them successful.
—or—
Build the future before the market forced them to.

In this conversation, Wes breaks down what that transformation really looked like:

• The moment he realized success was becoming a constraint,
• Why moving into software challenged the identity of the organization,
• How internal resistance shows up when people fear what change means for them,
• The strategic bet that made the transformation irreversible,
• Why speed, iteration, and customer pilots mattered more than perfect planning,
• How Fluke built a new growth engine in predictive and preventative maintenance,
• What it takes to protect a new venture inside a large, successful company.

Wes also shares a reality most leaders underestimate: You are asking your best people — the ones who built the current success — to question the very model that made them successful.

And that's where most transformations fail.

This episode is a real-world look at what it takes to navigate disruption from a position of strength — not theory, not hindsight, but leadership in the moment.

Because the biggest risk isn't disruption.

It's believing you have more time than you do.

📩 Subscribe to the Lean Focus Podcast
🔗 Follow Lean Focus: https://leanfocus.com
📌 Follow Lean Focus on LinkedIn for more CEO-level transformation insights: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lean-focus-llc/