- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady speaks with a CEO about his devotion to lean manufacturing.
- The big leadership story: Job-hopping isn’t paying off like it used to.
- The markets: Mixed globally as U.K. and European markets end their recent rallies.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Nothing screams ‘yesterday’s man’ (or woman) like talking about kaizens and lean manufacturing. The continuous-improvement program made famous by Toyota in the 1950s was embraced by corporate America before many of us got our first job. Today GE Aerospace CEO Larry Culp is an ardent proponent, as are Ford’s Jim Farley and Baxter International chief Andrew Hider, who just concluded his first annual “President’s Kaizen Week.” But maximizing value while minimizing waste through human-led continuous improvement processes can sound quaint. Most manufacturers would rather talk about digital transformation, automation, and AI than poka-yoke, gemba walks and the three Ms of waste (muda, mura, muri!).
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.”
He says lean has enabled a cultural shift, too, as the company completed the spinoff of its $3.3 billion-a-year bioscience and diagnostic solutions units earlier this month to focus on its $18.5 billion medical technology business. While BD faces pricing pressure in China and a range of challenges at home, its stock is up 19% this year while the S&P 500 is flat. With a streamlined operation and a workforce focused on daily improvements, BD’s lean champion-in-chief feels optimistic. “Leaders’ responsibility is to absorb complexity up and push simplicity down,” Polen said. “You get what you measure, but you get what you celebrate even more than you get what you measure. Every promotion, every plant visit, every town hall is used to celebrate continuous improvement behaviors, not just financial outcomes.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top leadership news
Job-hopping is losing its perks
A new pay trends report from ADP shared with Fortune found that job hoppers are seeing their year-over-year pay growth cool, slipping from 6.6% in December to 6.4% in January. Employees who stayed put saw pay growth of 4.5%, narrowing the gap between job switchers and stayers to its smallest since 2020.
Figma posts solid earnings amid software cooldown
Cloud-based design platform Figma reported a 40% year-over-year jump in quarterly revenue on Wednesday and defied the ongoing SaaS-pocalypse with a 15% jump in share price in after-hours trading.
Deutsche Bank asks AI which industries are most vulnerable to automation
Deutsche Bank asked its proprietary AI model (which runs on Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro) to identify the sectors most vulnerable to AI automation. The model flagged IT, software, and finance roles as among the most at-risk, while fields such as patient care and education were among the least exposed.
The markets
S&P 500 futures were down 0.37% this morning. The last session closed up 0.56%. STOXX Europe 600 was down 0.61% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.67% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.57%. Chinese markets are closed for the New Year. South Korea’s KOPSI was up 3.09%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 1.410%. Bitcoin was down to $67K.
Around the watercooler
Top Trump advisor furious about true cost of tariffs being revealed, vows to punish New York Fed for ‘worst paper’ ever in history by Jake Angelo
High-flier: Palantir CEO Alex Karp spent $17.2 million on private jets in 2025, filing reveals by Nick Lichtenberg
Big Tech execs playing ‘Russian roulette’ in the AI arms race could risk human extinction, warns top researcher by Tristan Bove
OpenAI is paying workers $1.5 million in stock-based compensation on average, the highest of any tech startup in history by Preston Fore
Amazon exec says the most important lessons from Jeff Bezos were the 16 leadership principles he once dismissed as cultlike by Sydney Lake
CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.
