Archive for June, 2010
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By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking
- Last updated: Sunday, June 27, 2010 |
How do you build a culture such that problems are seen as opportunities for improvement? It all starts at the top and cascades down from there in my opinion. Employees are somewhat like young children in a family. They tend to model and reinforce behavioral norms that they see around them especially traits from senior leaders. In Toyota's case there are lots of roots to examine that influenced the company's culture and development with respect to this dimension.
For starters there are the five Toyoda Precepts attributed to founder Sakichi Toyoda and codified by his sons Kiichiro and Risaburo in 1935. ...
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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, ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Saturday, June 19, 2010 |
I always feel a little uncomfortable when a question begins with: "How do you build a culture that does ____?" As far as I know there is no lego set for building culture. In the last chapter of our book Toyota Culture we quote Edgar Schein as saying: "Never start with the idea of changing your culture. Always start with the issue the organization faces."
Why would a leading cultural guru suggest we avoid changing culture? I do not think he is saying culture does not matter or even that culture cannot change. He is saying that culture is extremely difficult ...
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By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Saturday, June 19, 2010 |
Culture is largely about how you define success, and the acceptable means to obtain this success. Within lean programs, the issue of failure rarely comes up because we define success as learning, and failure and success are intimately linked in the process. What we do find, is that some people take to it quite naturally, while others adamantly refuse to learn, whatever the consequences.
I was recently on the shop floor in an automotive supplier plant with the operations manager, the plant manager and the area manager. They’d been working with lean for a number of years and had implemented several ...
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By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Sunday, June 13, 2010 |
One way to support a "opportunity culture" is to stop rewarding
firefighting. Instead of performance reviews discussing specific objectives
and challenges overcome, target more on lack of crisis and even flow. I
remember discussing with a manager the performance review of a cell leader
that described him as not being "action oriented" and "lacking leadership
skills." I had actually managed this person before and it did not fit with
my experience. What we determined was the new manager was expecting to see
more heroics and had not really thought about the fact that the cell under
this leader's guidance had steadily improved all the key metrics and had
developed ...
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By Sebastian Fixson, Co-author of 'The Power of Integrality & Evolving models of supplier
involvement in design'
- Last updated: Sunday, June 13, 2010 |
The negative press that Toyota recently received in association with the recalls, made me think about an issue that on one hand seems to be central to lean, but on the other is very difficult for many organizations to actually do. That is: confronting ‘problems.’ As earlier blog entries discussed, there are two ways of looking at something like Toyota’s plant closure announcement: (i) It simply is the extension of Toyota’s commitment to ‘stop the line’ when a problem is detected to find the root cause no matter how expensive, or (ii) the size of the expense for the plant ...
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By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World'
- Last updated: Friday, June 11, 2010 |
The best way to answer this question is to summarise two contrasting real stories – one that got it and one that still does not – at different ends of the same sector.
The successful case began with a question from a senior Director – “How could these lean Toyota ideas help my business?” “Let’s take a walk and see” was my answer. As we walked it because clear there was waste everywhere. This very quickly led to a meeting with the CEO who was intrigued and gave us the go ahead to begin some experiments to demonstrate the potential scale ...
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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 ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Thursday, June 10, 2010 |
One thing we know about lean is that you learn it by doing it, not by sitting in the office. With all of the different types of organizations I have worked with I must admit that it has been rare to go with the CEO to the gemba. They have not participated in kaizen activities, our meetings are in offices and board rooms, and in other cases I personally never met the CEO. For the most part our contacts have only gone as high as the vice president level (engineering, continuous improvement, quality, operations). That is a problem. We have ...
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By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking
- Last updated: Saturday, June 5, 2010 |
I think Tom Ehrenfeld asks an interesting question for us to consider. In its shorter form "How do you convince others to be lean?" I'll go out on a limb and say that you don't. Or more specifically at least that I don't bother trying to. Leaders have to decide for themselves what to do and how to go about doing it to a large extent. Otherwise they are not real leaders in my opinion. Sure they might need some assistance but I have never seen a very successful company of any type that did not have excellent leadership. So ...
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By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See
- Last updated: Saturday, June 5, 2010 |
How can you convince decision makers that lean is not a program, but a way of doing business to achieve superior performance?
One thing I take from this question and the posts about it here on The Lean Edge is some consensus that Lean is a different way of managing, rather than just tools, workshops and improvement programs that happen within the existing way of managing. Maybe the ways of managing can be summarized like this:
Traditional way:
Establish targets
Describe solutions
Provide incentives
Periodically check results
Lean way:
Establish targets
Develop the capability in people to develop solutions
Changing how you manage an organization is a different undertaking than ...
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By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Friday, June 4, 2010 |
Rather than think about how to convince others to be lean, let’s try a different thought experiment: what does it take to be a lean leader? First, you need someone who has reached a senior position and is still committed to self-improvement and learning, and be willing to learn about the lean principles in depth. Secondly, this person must be ready to commit to going to the gemba at least twice a week. Thirdly, they must profoundly believe that if they train their people better and empower them to solve their own problems (and help them doing so), they can ...
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By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Thursday, June 3, 2010 |
Monday I was at a Memorial Day cook out (where else!). I met a guy who does systems consulting and was telling me how he was into process improvement. His firm had hired this “crazy” guy who was into lean. He went into the client and showed them how they could get all the work for a process (I think it was entering orders) done in one and half day for the entire country by creating a flow line. Each job had standard work and they paced the flow based on the printer sound which was ...
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By Pascal Dennis, Author of Getting The Right Things Done, Lean Production Simplified, and Andy & Me
- Last updated: Tuesday, June 1, 2010 |
Building on Orrie's point, connecting with CEO means understanding upstream & downstream of the factory.
Marketing, Design, Engineering, Order Fulfillment, Customer Service & the like.
The CEO's gemba, and Value Streams, comprise all of these.
How often do lean practitioners go see them?
It's hard work, admittedly, to go see such gembas -- understand what we're seeing. But if we don't, we'll suboptimize & CEO's will tune us out -- (rightly).
A few small examples:
In Marketing, Brand management would greatly benefit from the clarity & simplicity of Lean thinking.
Marketing execs, for example, have found Strategy Deployment to be invaluable in aligning Design activity with emerging portfolio gaps.
Moreover, Lean fundamentals like STW, visual management ...
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By Orry Fiume, Co-author of Real Numbers: Management Accounting in a Lean Organization
- Last updated: Tuesday, June 1, 2010
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The way we approached it at Wiremold was to realize that what we call Lean is not an improvement program, not a manufacturing tactic, not a cost reduction tool, but is a strategy. The purpose of any strategy (lean or otherwise) is to createsustainable competitive advantage. Lean does that by allowing an organization to differentiate itself in the market place through operational excellence. We realized that if we could reduce the lead time in the market for giving quotes, delivering product, introducing new products, etc, so that we were substantially better than our competition (90%+), we could achieve a competitive ...
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Sandrine Olivencia
Operae Partners