Executive Summary

The Senior Director of the Success EDGE Lean Business System is a newly-created permanent executive position at Success Academy Charter Schools. The Senior Director will collaborate with executives and team members across the enterprise to design, create and implement our client’s new Lean business management system, similar to Toyota Management System, Danaher Business System, Fortive/Envista Business System. Relocation to New Your City metro anticipated. Reports to C-Level. Fast-paced organization; Lean start-up, high-impact mindset. Exceptional opportunity for professional growth, career advancement, personal satisfaction.

Client Overview

Our client is Success Academy Charter Schools, https://www.successacademies.org/.

Founded in 2006, Success Academy Charter Schools is the largest and highest-performing free, public charter school network in New York City. Admission is open to all New York State children, including those with special needs and English language learners.

Success Academy operates 45 schools serving ~18,000 students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Students are admitted by a random lottery held each April. Across the network, 78% of students are from low-income households; 8.5% are current and former English Language Learners, and 15% are current and former special needs students. About 53% of students are black, 30% are Latino, 7% white, 5% Asian, and 5% multiracial or other.

Authorized by the State University of New York’s Charter School Institute, Success Academy schools are able to operate with greater independence than zoned schools but are held strictly accountable to the state for student performance.

Mission & Values: ACTION

The mission of Success Academies is to reimagine public education. From the classroom to the halls of government, this means finding profoundly different approaches to how we structure, implement and support schooling. We reconceive every aspect of school design, from writing rigorous new curricula to drawing regularly on the advances in technology and business that are transforming every sector except education. Our values, in ACTION:

Agency
Every member of our community takes ownership! We take responsibility for making sure that our schools and scholars are reaching the highest possible standards across the board.

Curiosity
Our schools are fueled by wonder. Scholars, teachers, and staff always ask, “What if?”

Try & Try
Our entire community understands that tackling tough challenges takes elbow grease, grit, and perseverance.

Integrity
We are honest, open, and transparent.

Others
We never forget to look out for each other. From helping someone on a project to smiling in the hallways, we build a community of mutual respect and support.

No Shortcuts
Excellent learning takes time and effort.

Position Profile

Over the past decade, Success Academies has grown faster than any charter network in the nation, building a vibrant network of 45 elementary, middle and high schools. Our ~18,000 children – mostly poor and minority – are out-performing students at top city and suburban schools across New York State. Our goals going forward are even more ambitious: to grow to 100 schools and to educate 50,000 children across New York City in a uniquely holistic pre-K-12 system, bringing transformational change here and across the country. At 100 schools, we will graduate 3,000 scholars each year who are prepared to enter, persist and graduate from college and eventually to lead in business, government and civic realms.

Inspired by our partnership with Danaher, a global science and technology innovator committed to helping its customers solve complex challenges and improve the quality of life around the world, Success Academies has recently launched Success EDGE — an internal capability that will help drive efficiency and innovation leveraging Danaher’s proven Toyota Production System-based Danaher Business System (DBS) methodologies. Reporting to the Managing Director, Office of the CEO, the Senior Director, Success EDGE (internal title; externally, Director, Lean Transformation & Success EDGE Business System) will plan, execute and manage the work of designing, codifying, and implementing processes and systems that are optimized and digitized to the extent possible.

We’re searching for a strong Lean implementation leader, an individual with 12-15 or so years of extraordinary success implementing TPS, DBS, Fortive Business System or others based on similar principles and practices.

More specifically, the Success EDGE Director will be responsible for…

Building Success EDGE Capacity:
● Develop mastery in EDGE processes and tools with emphasis on Problem Solving Process, Visual and Daily Management, and Transactional Process Improvement;
● Continue to evolve EDGE tools;
● Roll out these processes and tools within Success Academies as the standard enterprise continuous improvement methodology; and
● Facilitate Success Academies’ embrace of this standard methodology through application and delivery of both formal and informal trainings at Gemba.

Execution of Success EDGE Projects:
Guided by the roadmap and with appropriate resource support, the Director, Success EDGE will be expected to…
● Drive targeted and radical improvements by applying the DBS methodologies which Success EDGE has adopted. It is anticipated that achievement of outcomes often will include planning and executing kaizens;
● Promote and facilitate the diagnosis of workflow impediments and other wasteful activities that exist throughout the Network;
● Provide informal and formal counsel to Success Academies’ teams on how best to apply EDGE methodologies and think differently about the work; and
● Ensure effective project and change management processes to drive sustainable improvements.

A successful candidate will have the following experience and qualifications:
● Experience applying Danaher Business Systems, Fortive Business Systems, and/or Lean based on principles of the Toyota Management System;
● Drive to achieve excellence through display of extraordinarily high expectations for quality of work and a reflex to improve with urgency at every turn;
● Excellent organizational, program management, problem-solving and data gathering skills and ability to manage multiple, shifting priorities;
● Ability to work through, synthesize, and narrate complex issues or new initiatives with a sense of ownership, drive and urgency;
● Influencing skills in order to drive understanding and adoption;
● A high degree of comfort with challenging current-state thinking and assumptions;
● The nimbleness of a proactive go-getter, energized by the opportunity to be part of a dynamic, results-driven, entrepreneurial culture where change is rapid; and
● An eagerness to learn and take onboard feedback to grow and achieve full potential.

Why Success Academy Charter Schools Might Be for YOU

Simply this: If you feel a calling to use your Lean innovation and continuous improvement expertise to help reimagine and reinvent public education in America, there isn’t a better place to make that happen than here.

This position will be highly visible internally and externally, complex and challenging, and insanely demanding. And, for the right person, immensely rewarding.

In 2019, of 7,405 students taking exams, 99% passed math, with 86% scoring at the highest level of 4, and 90% passed ELA, with 41% scoring a 4. This year’s test results demonstrate that children across all demographics — racial and economic, as well as those who have IEPs, are English Language Learners, or are experiencing homelessness — can achieve outstanding academic results. In all subgroups, Success Academy scholars outperformed their peers.

YOU can help make the organization that gets these kinds of results do even better, so if you want a shot at solving bigger problems, I’d like to speak with you!

Please contact Adam Zak at +1 239.302.3344 or zak@LeanRecruiter.com