Breaking: Gene Kim and Dr. Steven J. Spear Win Shingo Publication Award for Wiring the Winning Organization

We are thrilled to announce that Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification by Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear has been honored with the prestigious Shingo Publication Award—marking the second Shingo Publication Award for Kim and the sixth for Spear, who bring exceptional credentials to this collaboration.

Revolutionary Theory of Organizational Management

Wiring the Winning Organization presents a new way of thinking about what makes organizations successful. The key isn’t just having talented people or good technology—it’s how work flows between people and teams. The book shows leaders how to redesign their organization’s systems so that when problems arise, they can be solved quickly and safely, rather than creating chaos and stress.

As Kim and Spear explain: “The best leaders create, sustain, and improve their organizations’ social circuitry, the overlay of the processes, procedures, routines, and norms that enable people to do their work easily and well.” When this circuitry is well-wired, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

As Ken Snyder, Executive Director of the Shingo Institute, notes: “Receipt of the Shingo Publication Award signifies an author’s significant contribution and practical application to the body of knowledge regarding organizational excellence.”

Building on a Legacy of Excellence

Wiring the Winning Organization represents the culmination of a long collaboration between Kim and Spear, drawing on decades of meticulous research of high-performing organizations and cross-population surveys of tens of thousands of employees. The work has also been recognized as the 2025 Crosby Medal award winner, the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist, and shortlisted for the 2024 Business Book Award.

This recognition marks a significant milestone for both authors, who bring proven track records of Shingo recognition to their collaboration. Gene Kim previously won the Shingo Publication Award in 2019 for Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, co-authored with Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble. Steven J. Spear brings even more extensive Shingo recognition as a six-time winner of the Shingo Prize, including winning the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research for his acclaimed book The High-Velocity Edge. The collaboration brings together two of the most decorated authors in the field of organizational excellence, representing decades of research into high-performing organizations and practical frameworks for achieving operational excellence.

The Shingo Institute, part of the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University, is home to the Shingo Prize and is named after Japanese industrial engineer Shigeo Shingo, a key architect of the Toyota Production System. The Institute has developed the Shingo Model™, which serves as the foundation for educational offerings worldwide, helping organizations build cultures of continuous improvement and principled leadership.

The Shingo Publication Award represents one of the highest honors in the field of organizational excellence, recognizing exceptional works that advance our understanding and practice of principled leadership and continuous improvement. This award aligns with the Shingo Institute’s mission to inspire leaders through proven principles that create lasting organizational transformation.

The authors will be formally recognized at the SHINGO CONNECT Awards Gala on March 19, 2026, in San Diego, California. This premier event brings together organizational leaders from around the world for workshops, site tours, keynotes, and sessions focused on achieving operational excellence.

About the Award-Winning Book

Wiring the Winning Organization presents a revolutionary framework built on over fifty years of combined organizational research. Through three core principles—simplification, slowification, and amplification—Kim and Spear demonstrate how organizations can:

• Move from complex, fast-changing “danger zones” to simpler, controlled “winning zones”
• Overcome complex operational challenges and liberate people’s ingenuity
• Enable individuals’ creativity to be integrated into collaborative efforts
• Accelerate problem-solving capabilities and push the frontiers of performance
• Achieve greater agility, higher quality, faster time to market, and greater resilience
• Close the critical gap between strategic goals and measurable results
• Increase employee engagement and profitability through improved organizational design

This data-driven playbook for excellence provides concrete tools—not platitudes—to convert mediocrity into mastery, featuring dozens of real-world case studies demonstrating how leading organizations leverage the three mechanisms to drive exceptional results.

Industry Acclaim

The book has garnered exceptional praise from leaders across diverse industries:

Technology & Retail:

• “This is a fabulous book that I highly recommend… successful organizations flow from leaders who create the conditions in which many others thrive.” —Paul Gaffney, former CTO, The Home Depot, Kohl’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods

Security & Cloud:

• “Kim and Spear lay out an amazing vision of the social circuitry for organizations to not only handle complexity but thrive while doing so.” —Phil Venables, Chief Information Security Officer, Google Cloud

Consumer Brands:

• “This book clearly teaches you how to rewire your organization to move with focused, sustained urgency and win!” —Courtney Kissler, SVP Customer and Retail Technology, Starbucks

Military Leadership:

• “I would have been much more successful if I had known about and practiced these ideas… It’s worth every minute of your time.” —ADM John Richardson (ret), 31st Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy

Meet the Award-Winning Authors

Gene Kim is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author whose books have sold over 1 million copies. As founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years and author of six influential books, Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. Beyond his previous Shingo Award for Accelerate, his works include The Phoenix Project, The Unicorn Project, and The DevOps Handbook. Since 2014, he has organized what is now the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit, studying technology transformations in large, complex organizations.

Steven J. Spear (DBA, MS, MS) is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, founder of the business process software firm, See to Solve,  and is a five-time winner of the Shingo Prize, including recognition for his influential book The High-Velocity Edge, which also won the Philip Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality. His foundational 1999 Harvard Business Review article “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” is considered part of the lean manufacturing canon, and his McKinsey Award-winning work “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today” represents one of his many articles to win Shingo Research Prizes. A leading expert working at the intersection of innovation and operations with systems thinking and organizational learning, Spear has advised institutions across technology, manufacturing, and healthcare, including his instrumental work helping develop the Alcoa Business System, the DTE Energy operating system, and the Pittsburgh Perfecting Patient Care approach.

- About The Authors

Leah Brown

Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered content with the assistance of AI tools.

Follow Leah on Social Media

•