Mike Rother is an engineer, a researcher, teacher and speaker on the subjects of management, leadership, improvement, adaptiveness, and change in human organizations. He has been a member of the Industrial Technology Institute (Ann Arbor), the University of Michigan College of Engineering, the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (Stuttgart), and the Technical University Dortmund.

Mike Rother has been in hundreds of companies and is well-known for his book Toyota Kata, which explains a means for developing, activating and mobilizing human potential in a way that makes scientific working a daily habit. His previous book, Learning to See, is known around the world as the standard explanation and user guide for Value Stream Mapping.