Michael Ballé, PhD. is a business writer and executive coach. He has written extensively on lean management, co-authoring the best-selling The Gold Mine trilogy and The Lean Strategy, as well as many other titles. He helps organizations improve by focusing on leadership, learning, and developing people, individually and collectively, and he co-founded the Institut Lean France to support Lean thinking in France.

Nicolas Chartier is co-founder and CEO of Aramis Group, a publicly listed pan-European leader in online used-car retail, operating across six countries and employing approximately 2,500 people. He has spent two decades applying lean thinking to scale the company from a Paris start-up into a listed group, combining lean and digital principles in daily management. He co-authored Raise the Bar with Michael Ballé, Guillaume Paoli, and Régis Medina to share what this learning journey has taught him about leadership, growth, and the development of people at scale.

Julie Chevalier is a lean coach and community leader with more than 17 years of experience supporting organizations in their transformation journeys. As International Director of Institut Lean France and Managing Partner at Lean Sensei Partners, she works with CEOs and leadership teams across industries to strengthen management practices and build learning systems at the gemba. She also plays a leading role in connecting and developing the lean community in France through national conferences, community initiatives, and the Lean blog authors' network.

Sandrine Olivencia is an entrepreneur, author, and business advisor. She is the co-author of Build to Sell and the Shingo Prize-winning The Lean Sensei. Coming from the tech and digital world, she works with CEOs and leadership teams to lead lean transformation programs and build product-driven organizations. Her work focuses on improving decision-making and developing people to build high-impact products, which she describes as "artisanship at scale." She is co-founder of Taktique Academy, an e-training organization dedicated to helping product and team leaders apply lean thinking in practice.

Daryl Powell is the KONGSBERG Chair Professor of Production Management at the University of South-Eastern Norway and a Visiting Professor at the University of Bergamo in Italy. He is also a Senior Advisor at SINTEF Industry in Norway and Honorary Professor of Practice at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in the UK. He has more than 20 years' experience studying and guiding lean transformations in the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, North America and Asia. His lean research appears in more than 200 articles in international journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings, and he is the recipient of three Shingo Research and Publication Awards.

Eivind Reke is a writer, researcher, and executive coach focused on lean thinking, leadership, and the development of learning organizations. He has written extensively on Lean management and people development, chronicled in Searching for the Kaizen Spirit Under the Northern Lights, as well as co-authoring the Shingo-Prize-winning The Lean Sensei. He is a research manager at SINTEF Industry and an experienced advisor who works closely with executives in Norway and internationally to strengthen leadership, collaboration, and sustainable improvement.