The KaiZone Friday Favorites for October 10th, 2014

In the KaiZone Friday Favorites, I present my top ten favorite articles from the last two weeks in the world of Lean, continuous improvement and beyond.  With leading content from the world’s foremost improvement authors and future lean leaders, I do the research so you don’t have to!

The Top 10 Lean Blog Posts for October 10th, 2014

10.  The Lean Starting Line by Jamie Flinchbaugh. “Let’s face it: One of the reasons you are interested in lean is that so many other people are doing lean, and you’re afraid you must be missing something. It’s not quite cult behavior, but it does have some similarities. This is a horrible reason, albeit a common one.  Some of the rational but generic answers aren’t much better, such as “be more competitive.” That was true 10 years ago and will be true 10 years from now, so why does it compel us to try using a different means of managing such as lean? It doesn’t compel us at all.”

9. How Leadership Influences Company Culture by Allan Wilson. “There have been many studies and examples over the years that prove the link between business culture and business performance. Most leaders understand this connection and studies show that many CEOs consider it as important to success as strategy. But, if the results of employee engagement and satisfaction studies are to be believed, it is clear that not everyone is aware of how leadership influences company culture or how to bring about meaningful change.”

8. Are You Managing People or Making Way for their Creativity to Shine? by Boaz Tamir. “The role of the manager as organizational architect entails three main stages: clear definition of goals, provision of significant and consistent feedback; and maintaining challenges. This builds a graduated increase in the level of difficulty and complexity in the tasks that make up innovation and value-creation.  This requires a new kind of manager: manager-educators, dedicated to creating value flow. These manager-educators enable value-producing workers to express their personal and social talents and abilities in an expanse of excellence – ecstasy.”

7.  Leading the Way with Leading Indicators by Steve Taninecz. “All of the A3’s that we worked so hard on to define our countermeasures; all of the kaizen events that gave us action plans and new processes; we didn’t do this great work to come up with more interim measures of outcome.  We did this great work to define where and how to change our behavior.  By changing our behavior, we drive process improvement.  That behavior change is what we need to measure every day.  Because if we are correct in defining the basic behavior change, guess what?  The metrics and measures that we live and die with, will follow!”

6.  Overproduction by Bruce Hamilton. “One of my favorite Shigeo Shingo quotes is: “The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.”  Overproduction’s stealth has been legislated into management accounting and operations policy, and until this is recognized, it will be rationalized as a necessary evil, needed to “hit the numbers.”

5.  Breaking Symmetry and Restoring Symmetry by Bob Emiliani. “Business is a natural process when it is symmetrical, but an unnatural process when it is asymmetrical. Asymmetry in business introduces time delays and process inefficiencies that consume greater resources. Thus, there are always penalties for introducing asymmetry. For example, asymmetry is introduced when leaders favor one internal or external stakeholder over another, such as finance over human resources. Asymmetry is introduced when leaders declare (incorrectly) that the purpose of business is to “maximize shareholder value.” This contrived purpose breaks symmetry, introduces imbalances, and results in ugliness, especially for employees and suppliers.”

4.  Continuous Learning – Leading & Improving Performance by Erik Hager. “Responding to issues and complexity that keep the dollars from flowing is urgent. Engaging and coaching employees in observation, designing, performing, managing and improving their work processes to ensure the volume of dollars can be sustained and increased is important.  As a Leader what are you getting for the time you spend? Is it time to rethink the urgent items on your calendar and really understand the importance of Leader Standardized Work in Improving Performance?”

3.  Looking Ahead or Looking Down? by Bill Waddell. “Having responsibility for short term results taken off of their plate and assigned to a Value Stream Manager should be a huge relief for senior managers – not a threat to their status. Lack of vision and lack of focus on the future is a huge problem for many, many companies. The plan for the future has to be more than an assumption that everything will be the same and our goal is to do everything we do now only better. . . When there is no vision and there is no strategy, the default strategy becomes ‘cost reduction’; and when the primary goal is cost reduction it is a sure fire sign of senior leadership that spends all its time looking down rather than looking ahead to see where we are going.

2.  Why Leadership and “Respect” are Fundamentally Entwined by Michael Ballé. “ respect is about committing to employee’s success – employees have a right to succeed with us, not a duty, and we need to define this success together. In practice, respect is about keeping employees safe from accidents and harassment, about truly listening to the obstacles they face, about developing everyone’s skill and autonomy, and indeed, about using every person to the fullest of their abilities. No debate. But as long as we keep exhorting traditional leaders to be “more respectful” we miss the point. The point is to develop a new kind of leadership which is equally hard-nosed about achieving objectives, but that does this with people, not to them.”

And in this week’s Friday Favorite, let us hope that this clarifies matters for the masses . . . 

1.  What Lean Really Is by Daniel T. Jones. “Lean shares the same scientific approach to the analysis of work with many improvement methodologies, like BPR, Six Sigma and TQM. But it differs from them in how it is used. Rather than experts using scientific methods to design better systems, lean builds superior performance by developing the problem solving capabilities of the front line, supported by a hands-on management system.  Lean is therefore a path or journey of individual and organizational learning and leads to more challenging and fulfilling work for those involved. It is learnt by doing it and through repeated practice rather than by studying books or in the classroom.”

Have a great weekend, friends!