Over the last 15 years of my lean journey, there are two themes that I repeatedly learn, respect, and waste elimination. Both of these concepts are foundational to the Toyota Production System. I was taught that TPS tools and principles exist to expose waste, so it can be eliminated. I was also taught that the execution of these tools must be done in a way that is respectful to people. The latter is more [...]
At its best Lean can be a powerful catalyst for cultural transformation. In the short term, its implementation can change the way teams interact and how they create and deliver value to the customer and each other. In the midterm, new processes beget new routines that together engender behavior change. Over time, if the Lean effort is sustained, that behavior change gives rise to the fabled continuous improvement mindset that [...]
Oftentimes my efforts to help client organizations improve performance involves assessing the impact of their culture on productivity. For example, despite the fact that many of our days are over stuffed with appointments and conference calls, we don’t typically feel like we’re getting enough done or doing enough well. This article from HBR sheds some light on why that is.
Recently I spoke at the AME conference in Boston and presented Conflict is the Root of All Waste - Continuous Improvement doesn’t stick. The conference brings together people interested in Lean and continuous improvement from over 50 countries and is considered the largest lean conference in the world. In addition to exploring conflict, how we deal with it and how it inhibits our change efforts, we also took a deeper look [...]
There’s an interesting read in this month’s Harvard Business Review (HBR): The Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Decision Making. The article explores the implications of variation in employee judgment and specifically, how to solve for that variation. In essence, the article was about Mura – the Japanese term meaning waste of unevenness / variation. Like many of my clients, the organization featured in the article hadn’t previously considered the impact [...]
I was recently engaged by a VP of Operations to help him make the case for Lean to executive leadership. To that end, I was also tasked with convincing the CEO to revisit (and maybe refine) the organization’s values, purpose, goals. My recommendation was that an airtight business orientation would be essential to driving the organizational alignment necessary for Lean to flourish. While I waited for my meeting to [...]
I get the idea behind incentive plans –reward employees for extra effort related to achieving some sort of organizational goal. Typically one that has been hard to come by. Sometimes they work. When expectations are VERY clear. When the goal isn’t too complex. When employees have enough autonomy to affect ANY issues in their path that impede performance. Most of the time they don’t. First, [...]
As a Continuous Improvement expert, I’m a control freak big fan of data. I wholeheartedly believe that you can’t create lasting improvements without 1 - benchmarking and 2 -understanding the context in which the data was derived. But despite the fact that you can quantify nearly every aspect of a process in its current state, when making projections about the future state, stakeholders must understand that even highly detailed projections [...]
