Darren Harbst has over 35 years of leadership experience and over 23 years of Lean Transformation experience in Manufacturing, Distribution and Healthcare. He spent over 12 years in the US Army as a Commissioned Officer and served in 2 combat deployments to the Middle East. After his military service, Darren has held various leadership positions from front line team leader to Senior Vice President of Operations for a Global Distribution and Manufacturing company. He has delivered breakthrough business results by focusing on developing leaders in the fundamentals of change management and lean continuous improvement.

Darren learned the lean transformation approach to continuous improvement over his 9 years at Danaher - one of the most well known and recognized Lean Manufacturing organizations in the US. He was certified as a Master Blackbelt in various Lean tools while he worked at Danaher. After working at Danaher, Darren jumped at the opportunity to go into Healthcare to refine his Lean Transformation skills in a different industry.
In the Primary Care setting, using his Lean Transformation and Leadership skills, Darren was directly involved in developing a "Care Model" for a Family Medicine Practice that was subsequently spread across the entire Primary Care portion of the 2nd largest privately held Healthcare company in the US. Recently, he has implemented a Lean Transformation at a global distribution company while also setting up a manufacturing operation from scratch in Vietnam.
Darren's approach is simple - focus on developing the Leaders of the organization in critical leadership skills and lean transformation fundamentals, and then coach them as they teach their teams to drive continuous improvements as self-directed teams that are empowered to solve problems for themselves. Darren focuses 80% of his time on the leadership and only 15-20% of his time on the lean tools - this is what makes him unique as a Lean Leadership Coach.