Author Archive
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Monday, July 12, 2010 |
BACKGROUND: WHY LOOK AT TOYOTA? BECAUSE IT CAME FROM BEHIND TO DOMINATE ITS COMPETITION!
Understanding the tremendous commercial success of Toyota, rising from an uncompetitive auto maker in the 1950s and 1960s, to the most dominant in the world by 2000s, and understanding the vast benefit that has come to some that have diligently sought to emulate Toyota--sharp reductions in time and cost, with vast improvements in quality and responsiveness, is reason for others who have not yet to look more closely.
Toyota's success, after all, is rooted in its ability to generate and sustain broad based, high speed, relentless improvement and ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010 |
Sales and marketing may seem a far cry from the production shop floors on which 'lean' was first observed. Nevertheless, that type of work lends itself to exactly the same disciplines of rigorous discovery that allowed Toyota to come from beyond, over take its rivals, and run away from the field.
There is a mistaken notion that the essence of 'lean,' as an approximation of the Toyota Production System, is the stabilization of processes, heretofore chaotic, as an endpoint in and of itself.
Not so when practiced by the masters. 'Stabilization,' or more generally 'specification' is both a means of making clear ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 |
Managing work to see problems when and where they occur is a
necessary precondition--one too often overlooked--if an organization
is going to achieve bona fide continuous improvement in pursuit of
operational excellence.
Here's why.
Absent an ability to design perfect systems for design, production,
and delivery on the first try, operational excellence depends on
continuous improvement and relentless innovation. As important as it
is to have rigor in solving problems, the necessary pre condition is
managing work so problems—flaws in the current design of systems and
the current approaches to doing work--are seen when and where they
occur.
Deming, for example, was a passionate advocate of the 'Shewhart
Cycle' of Plan, Do, Check, ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Thursday, June 10, 2010 |
C level executives are often absent from 'lean initiatives,' 'lean transformations,' and the like.
This is unfortunate given the truthy cliche, "what is interesting to leaders, is fascinating to followers."
The question is, "Why?"
Let me suggest two reasons:
• Lean presented as a kit of system engineering tools which senior leaders feel they can delegate to technologists.
• Senior leaders not taught/trained for an environment of continuous improvement/discovery.
REASON 1: LEAN=TOOL KIT
The interpretation of lean manufacturing as a kit of system engineering tools, meant for the 'shop floor,' largely for high volume, low variety, repeated work, certainly impacts senior leaders view that lean is tactical ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Friday, May 14, 2010 |
There is a conventional wisdom that 'lean' and other efforts towards process excellence and 'innovation' conflict, the former about standardization and rigidity, the latter about free-flowing creativity.
There are reasons for those wisdoms, but they miss the significant complement between rigor in design and speed in improvement.
Lean grew out of efforts in the 1980s to understand Toyota's success catching American auto makers. People found approaches, particularly in the shop floor environment that allowed select organizations to operate with far greater stability and far less chaos than was the norm elsewhere. That stability and order led to far better ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Sunday, April 4, 2010 |
TQM, six sigma, lean, TPS, and the like stem from different sources but nevertheless share common approaches because they are responses to a common challenge: managing the design, operation, and improvement of complex systems of work--many people, spanning many disciplines, using multiple technologies, to deliver value to the market.
This is so challenging because the design of any complex system is a product of imperfect people's creative efforts. Hence, the initial design is imperfect and needs to be improved relentlessly.
Therefore, all these approaches have some element of rigor in:
• the design of work to reduce variation and to help distinguish between ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010 |
Thanks for the question.
With all due respect to Professor Schein, there are other alternative explanations to "abandon safety" or "safety never part of their culture." It is entirely possible (more likely) that safety--both workplace and product--remains part of their culture but maintaining perfection hit bumps in the road.
These bumps in the road are:
1: The need to develop an increasing number of great problem solvers at an accelerating rate because of business expansion.
2: The need to develop people's problems solving skills to greater depth because of increasing product and process complexity.
3: The difficulty of responding to the weak signals of problems ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010 |
The objective function in managing any system must be solving
problems and learning. There are four principles of a 'basic
science' of system design, operation, and management, which if
followed, generate, sustain, and accelerate high velocity learning,
improvement, and innovation. If they are not followed, learning,
improvement, and innovation are compromised.
(This basic science has a sound theoretical underpinning as it is
rooted in the science of closed loop control and experiential and
experimental learning.)
Learning, improvement, and innovation are core objective functions
because the complexity of the 'socio-technical' systems (e.g., groups
of people, doing interdependent work, to create value for others)
upon which we depend for delivering value to customers.
The complexity ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Friday, February 12, 2010 |
Dear Colleagues,
What went wrong with Toyota is the flip side of what went right over so many decades. In the late 1950s or 1960s, Toyota was a pretty cruddy car company. The variety was meager, quality was poor, and their production efficiency was abysmal.
Yet by the time they hit everyone’s radar in the 1980s, they had very high quality and unmatched productivity. The way they got there was by creating within Toyota exceptionally aggressive learning. They taught employees specialties, but more importantly, they taught people to pay very close attention to the “weak signals” the products and processes were sending ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Monday, February 8, 2010 |
Long the quality and efficiency standard-setter, Toyota now has an ostrich-sized egg on its face — a problem with sticking accelerator pedals that led to global product recalls and a suspension of production and sales.
There are important lessons to be learned from Toyota's stumble:
Competitive success is fluid. It depends on continuously discovering better ways to do work. The capabilities to do this are powerful but fragile and need constant reinforcement. Relentless attention to their development can lead to great success; conversely, a loss in attention can have grave consequences.
Please see the rest of the piece, "Learning from Toyota's Stumble http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/learning_from_toyotas_stumble.html
I ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Monday, January 25, 2010 |
Dear Peter,
Thanks so much for your question.
A few points, elaborated on below.
A: Success goes to those who improve and innovate most quickly and consistently.
B: The ability to do so is rooted in core capabilities/disciplines that allow relentless discovery.
C: Many managers are trained to think in terms of decisions, not discovery, thereby imperiling their ability to learn and improve continuously.
A: High Performance through High Velocity Discovery
In most sectors, even those with the most intense rivalry, there are standouts who achieve superlative performance by their ability to generate and then sustain improvement and innovation unmatched by breadth and speed.
B: Disciplines of Discovery ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit'
- Last updated: Friday, January 8, 2010 |
Many managers operate under a false premise: That they have to make decisions when confronted with unavoidable tradeoffs. Quality versus cost, safety versus productivity, etc.
The problem with the mindset trade off is that it is rooted in an arrogant pessimism.
Quality, safety, cost, yield, responsiveness and so forth are all derivative measures, the consequence of how the complex interactions among people and technology are managed. To focus on trade offs--that to get more of something means you have to give up something else--means you assume you are extracting as much cumulative value out of your work as possible.
To believe that true, you have to assume you already ...
Continue reading this entry »
Question of the moment 
Sandrine Olivencia
Operae Partners