Archive for March, 2010

Michael Ballé: Quality First, Safety Always By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Friday, March 19, 2010

Would Toyota sacrifice safety for profits? I have no idea how to test such a hypothesis, but I find it highly unlikely. If culture is made visible by behavior, one of the first things that impressed me with Toyota engineers as I observed them working with suppliers, was their unique focus on people before machinery or parts. Certainly, their safety focus was much higher than anything we’d seen before, and they played a strong part in raising safety awareness across the board. Indeed, one of the first points I personally raise in doing lean with any company is safety and ergonomics. ...

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Steve Spear: commitment to safety is unwavering, but perfection hits bumps in the road 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 ...

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Jeff Liker: The value of Trust – without safety in Toyota, nothing else matters By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010

It is interesting to get a question as direct as this, especially coming from a management icon like Edgar Schein.  Notice that the question implies Toyota is not concerned about safety regardless of how one answers. In the current recall crisis certainly the stories formulated by the press paint a picture of an arrogant company that is secretive about safety test results and has put profits before safety.  That message has been reinforced by many outside observers citing secret memos and mountains of data about sudden acceleration incidents over a decade that were ignored until the U.S. Department of Transportation had ...

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Ed Schein: Toyota’s Safety Culture By Edgar Schein, Author of Organizational Culture, and Leadership and The Corporate Culture Survival Guide - Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010

Art Smalley: Laws versus Thinking By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010

I think the analogy between thermodynamics and organizational dynamics is an interesting one to consider. It certainly made me stop and think for a couple of days. After mulling on the topic I have personal doubts regarding whether we can come up with laws for organizations as neatly as physicists did for the body of work known as thermodynamics. Even if we do the laws certainly won’t be as quantitative or specific. I'd like to point out that on a personal level laws in science carry a very positive connotation for me when I think about them. However the notion carries ...

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Dan Jones: The Laws of Lean Organisations By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010

It is not too far-fetched to think of lean as the science of getting useful work out of an organisation. But in this case the organisation does not exist in isolation – it has to serve its customers, work with its partners (employees, suppliers, distributors, shareholders etc) and find its place in the physical, economic and social environment in which it operates. This changes over time and so the laws of lean organisations will also change as societies face new challenges in the future. This is how I would summarise the “laws of lean”. The first lean law states that the ...

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Mike Rother: Possible Laws of Organodynamics By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010

What three laws of organodynamics would I suggest? Thank you for the thought-provoking question Dennis. I’m in no position to propose laws, but for the sake of discussion… Organization = An entity of two or more human beings that work together to achieve a goal. Organodynamics = The science of getting useful work out of organizations.  (Dennis Sherwood) First (proposed) law of organodynamics: Humans are equipped to deal with dynamic conditions. Our human capability for learning allows us to improve, innovate, create and adapt.  With its prefrontal cortex and synapses our brain is equipped to learn new rules and patterns. Second (proposed) law of organodynamics: The ...

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Michael Ballé: Combining the three Cs of Organodynamics: Competence, Compliance and Creativity By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010

FIRST LAW: without continuous process improvement, performance will deteriorate Entropy affects organizations as it does engines: without constant attention, any process will deteriorate. In the past this has been accepted as a necessary evil compensated by occasional investment. Let the machine run down and when you can’t do anything with it anymore, buy a new one. Kaizen thinking has opened a new way: by improving continuously existing processes we can avoid the performance decline by keeping people’s attention focused on getting the equipment and its operations as close as nominal performance as possible. Overall, significant leaps in performance will still be ...

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Jeff Liker: Managers Should Be Teachers, Not Simply Controllers By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010

1.  Clearly define the work as much as possible In the Toyota Way I discuss the concept of standardization to enhance innovation.  A core idea in kaizen is that you cannot improve a process that is not stable.  If an individual makes changes on their own nobody else benefits and if that individual moves on the improvement is lost.  Group learning (as opposed to individual learning) depends on standardization.  I also refer to Paul Adler's distinction between enabling bureaucracy (assists those doing the work and engages them) versus coercive bureaucracy (like Taylorism poses outside constraints to control the person).  In Toyota ...

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Steve Spear: The objective function in managing any system must be solving problems and learning 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 ...

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Dennis Sherwood: what could be the 4 laws of “organodynamics”? By Dennis Sherwood, Author of Forest for the Trees and Smart Things to Know about Innovation and Creativity - Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010

Jeff Liker: Five “Why?” Not Five “Who?” – start pointing fingers and engagement is over By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Interestingly I just spoke to a Canadian manufacturing company today that supplies Toyota and has several years of experience implementing TPS. He said his biggest disappointment was the the culture still does not support surfacing problems.  People are afraid they will be blamed and they hide problems.  So this seems to be a generic problem across manufacturing and service.  When I interviewed the first head of human resources for the Georgetown, Kentucky plant (Japanese) he said what was most startling to him when he first came to America was that Americans did not like to say they had a problem.  ...

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