After some much needed rest and relaxation, TheKaiZone is back! 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!
10. Building Capabilities, Transforming Organizations by Katie Anderson. “How do we develop as coaches WHILE we are developing others? We might reword the description of lean leadership this way: A lean leader’s job is to develop people as you get the job done AND concurrently develop yourself so that you can better develop others.”
9. Teaching Up in the Organization by Mark Graban. “If executives and senior leaders embrace Lean thinking (and continuous learning and development), then they are better able to teach others and model the right behaviors (look at folks like Dr. Dean Gruner, Art Byrne, and others). When the CEO “gets it,” it’s very very helpful. Some say necessary. But what if the CEO doesn’t get it? What if other senior leaders don’t get it?”
8. The Essential Skills & Knowledge for Every Leader by Matt Elson. “Leaders get results through people. Without that, you’re not a leader. It’s up to you to drive towards your true north condition, whatever that may be. In order to get there, a leader should focus on developing these essential skills and knowledge.”
7. Gemba Walks: Are You Going to See or to Be Seen? by Dave LaHote. “Lean thinking would have us always take a walk with a purpose. A senior manager would take a walk to better understand how well the management process is working. How effective is the daily management process? Does it focus on the few key measures and issues of the organization (like Safety, Quality, Delivery, and Cost)? How well is the improvement process and problem solving process working? What is the routine or “Kata” (see Toyota Kata)? How engaged are the people? Is coaching happening at the appropriate level and is it aligned to drive organizational results? Focusing on these things is what will drive sustainable results. If you only focus on financial results and compliance to corporate measures, you miss the point of a gemba walk and do little if anything to help your team.”
6. What is Questioning without Coaching? by Richard Tucker. “Coaching is not just an art, but also a skill that can be learned — to ask good questions, probe for understanding and know when to make suggestions. And, as Granddad used to say, “Experts know the answers; wise men know the questions.” “But remember,” Grandma would add with her mischievous grin, “there’s a fine line between a wise man and a fool.”
5. Lean Leaders Need to Ask Why by Karyn Ross. “Lean practitioners in both manufacturing and service organizations are familiar with the 5 Whys—the practice of asking why, over and over again, at least five times, in order to “drill down” to the root cause of a problem. The goal is to address the problem at the root cause instead of addressing a “symptom.” This is important, but there is an even more important reason for lean leaders to go to the gemba and question what they are seeing: It provides an opportunity to question their assumptions, which often are based on outdated or superficial knowledge.”
4. The Secret is in the Process by Bill Waddell. “As Wikipedia describes Core Competency, “To succeed in an emerging global market, it is more important and required to build core competencies rather than vertical integration.” Put another way, go ahead and whack the value stream with a giant meat axe and send all of it other than what you think is critical off to whatever jerkwater place can do it cheap. Pretty much the opposite of the Toyota/Henry Ford approach. The inevitable result of defining one silo along the value stream as important and relegating the rest to whoever can do it cheap is trashing the cycle time of the overall process, which only leads to lousy quality and mountains of non-value adding waste.”
3. Focus on Flow by Bob Emiliani. “The Lean community continues to face a problem that hurts efforts to advance progressive Lean management. It is the great difficulty in clearly separating and effectively communicating the difference between Real Lean and Fake Lean – Lean management done right from Lean management done wrong. On the surface, this distinction is rather simple. Real Lean is the application of both principles, “Continuous Improvement” and “Respect for People,” while Fake Lean is the application of only the “Continuous Improvement” principle. While the words are simple, their meaning is much broader and deeper than normally realized. As with all things Lean, it is the details that matter.”
2. Invisibility by Bruce Hamilton. “A chance reading recently provided a thought from Henry Thoreau that I think is worth sharing. Thoreau said: ‘The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer’. To paraphrase Henry Thoreau: ‘The greatest insult that was ever paid me was when no one asked me what I thought, or attended to my ideas.’ Are you attending to the ideas of your employees, or are they invisible?
In a bit of a change of pace for The KaiZone Friday Favorites, this week’s top spot goes to an uber-informative and data-rich study of the life cycle of the lean transformation:
1. Analyzing Corporate Lean by Torbjørn H. Netland & Kasra Ferdows. “There is little doubt that lean can significantly improve the performance of manufacturing organizations, but how this improvement manifests itself during the implementation process is less clear. There are several reasonable patterns: if we see lean as a never-ending journey of incremental and continuous improvement, for example, we would expect a linear relationship between implementation and performance. If we think of all the low-hanging fruits that are present in most factories, we could expect a faster improvement early on, which levels off later on. Or, considering the notion of organizational inertia (i.e., wherever there is change, there is resistance to it) we could expect a slow start followed by an exponentially growing performance improvement as more and more people are convinced. Which one it is – or if it is a combination of the patterns, or another pattern altogether – was exactly what we wanted to find out with our research.”
Do you have an article that you’d like to share with The KaiZone community? Hey, we don’t shy away from shameless self-promotion here at The KaiZone! Post it in the comments section below.
Also, don’t forget to submit your entries into the first ever Lean Song Parody Contest! Entries are due by September 30th, 2014.
Have a great weekend, friends!
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