Bobby MoestaInnovator, Entrepreneur, Professor and Advisor

‘Four Mentors’ by Bob Moesta

8 Dec 2022 · 3 min

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2:31

In this talk, Bob Moesta recounts how four pivotal mentors shaped his professional and personal development. At 18, he met Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the father of Lean and the Toyota Production System, who invited him to Japan and introduced him to Lean thinking. Over 27 years he spent quarterly hours with Clayton Christensen, learning about disruptive innovation and the dynamics of market cannibalization described in The Innovator’s Dilemma. He then describes Kenichi Toguchi, who taught him the value of testing—emphasizing prototyping to learn rather than merely to verify. Finally, he honors Dr. Willie Moore, his first boss at Ford, a pioneering African‑American particle physicist who instilled an empathetic, systems‑thinking perspective. Moesta frames these mentorships as generous knowledge transfers that helped a dyslexic, illiterate Detroit youth become a successful innovator, illustrating how mentorship can bridge gaps in education, confidence, and opportunity.

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I was very, very blessed that at 18 years old I met a gentleman by the name of Dr. Deming. He's the father of Lean. He went to Japan in 1948. To help rebuild the infrastructure, and he ended up creating the Toyota Production System, and he is the father of Lean, Six Sigma, all that kind of stuff. Turns out I asked him 52 questions in 22 minutes, and he just looked at me and said, God, are you a curious kid or what? How'd you like to work for me? I had no— I was in college, I had no idea what I was going to do for the summer. I said, sure. He said, let's go to Japan. I'm like, holy crap. So that's how I started to learn how to do a lot of these things. I've worked with this gentleman. I had 4 hours a quarter for 27 years with no agenda to work with Clayton Christensen. He had disruptive innovation. He basically wrote The Innovator's Dilemma and how we keep wanting to go upmarket and we get actually cannibalized by the people at the low end of the market who actually come after us. And it's about how do we disrupt markets, right? I also met this gentleman, Kenichi Toguchi, and he taught me how to test. Like, if you don't leave this conference Realizing how much testing we need to get better at, because it's the reps of testing and getting better at testing that's going to be like— he's— we'll talk more about him, but he really changed my entire life of teaching me how to prototype to learn versus prototype to verify. Dr. Willie Moore. She was my first boss at Ford. She was the first African American woman to graduate with a PhD in particle physics in 1969. From the University of Michigan, and she was hard as nails on me, hard as nails on me. But she taught me things like empathetic perspective, how to see things from other people's side, how to actually think of myself as a molecule, which we'll talk about. All of these people literally poured their— they were gracious enough to pour their knowledge into me, a dyslexic, illiterate kid from Detroit, and enabling me to actually go innovate Beyond my wildest dreams.