Our Team
First Principles Leadership is a team of transformation advisors and operational leaders dedicated to building thriving, resilient organizations through people-centric improvement and first-principles thinking.
Craig Stritar
Craig brings leadership experience from high-velocity teams in military special operations, as well as organizations in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and education. He combines this with a foundation in continuous improvement, shaped by close collaboration with manufacturing leaders from Danaher, healthcare innovator and MIT professor Steven Spear, and Fortune 500 CEO and Deming protégé Joseph S. Hood. His approach is rooted in people-centric systems thinking and a passion for developing high-performing, resilient teams.
Craig is internationally recognized for uncovering the true origins of “takt time,” a concept widely but mistakenly believed to have originated in Germany. Through research and translation of early scientific management works, he demonstrated that takt time was first developed in late 19th-century Poland as a means to harmonize human-to-human and human-to-machine interactions. In his own work, Craig has shown that lasting organizational excellence comes from aligning rhythm, teamwork, and human well-being, making harmony a foundational principle for improvement. This focus on harmony continues to shape Craig’s unique approach, where operational flow and human flourishing go hand in hand.
Craig is one of the very few practitioners to have led a measurable, lasting, organization-wide transformation in healthcare, creating a daily learning and improvement culture that continued to thrive long after major leadership turnover. The systems and practices he established, including daily rounding and kata experimentation cycles, are now cited as benchmarks across the Lean and continuous improvement community. In addition, through collaborative work with MIT professor Steven Spear, Craig was the first to test the See2Solve real-time issue-tracking system in a healthcare environment, empowering teams to quickly surface, track, and address operational problems.
Mark Rosenthal
Mark is a seasoned transformation coach and lean thinker with decades of experience guiding organizations across sectors—including aerospace, healthcare, consumer goods, and industrial supply chains. As the founder of Novayama Consulting and The Lean Thinker blog, Mark specializes in embedding daily coaching routines and Toyota Kata into organizational culture, helping teams move beyond tools into sustainable, people-led improvement.
He is widely recognized for his “Don’t Deploy, Diffuse” philosophy, featured in keynote talks at KataCon and Lean Frontiers, and for being acknowledged in Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata Practice Guide for his thought partnership. Mark’s writing and practical insights have been published in AME Target Magazine and Lean.org, including the piece he co-authored with Craig Stritar “Don’t Start with Tools.” His presentations are widely used to teach the principles of scientific thinking and the diffusion of learning into daily work.
Mark’s approach focuses on leadership, coaching, and creating systems that enable teams to sustain improvement long after consultants have left.