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!
Editor’s Notes
The last chance to enter the first ever Lean Song Parody Contest for a chance to win a book of your choice from the Lean Book Shop is swiftly approaching! Entries are due by September 30th.
Next week, I will be attending the 2014 Northeast LEAN Conference in Springfield, Mass. If anyone in TheKaiZone Community is also planning to attend and would like to meet-up, please feel free to use the Contact The KaiZone link on the main menu. I hope to see you all there!
The Top 10 Lean Blog Posts for September 27th, 2014
10. Is “Management By Scorecard” Merely “Management By Results” in Disguise? by Mike Stoeklein. “What’s wrong with [the scorecard] approach? Plenty. The approach is based on the prevailing style of management, what Dr. Deming called the “mythology of management”. . . These principles are not things that you “adopt”. They are like rules of science and nature – like “gravity”. They are based on foundational truths that are always present and affect equally those who understand them, and those who do not understand them. You do not adopt principles, “they adopt you”.
9. Four Ways to Spot a Great Sensei by Jon Miller. “The recent Wall Street Journal article titled Four Ways to Spot a Great Teacher raised the question of how parents can secure a good education for their children. What matters in fact most was not the head of the school or its various programs, but getting the learner connected with a great teacher. . . How many of us try to improve our business performance simply by seeking the guidance of an effective teacher?”
8. Scum Sucking Bottom Feeders and Lean Manufacturing by Bill Waddell. “This is precisely the economic principle behind lean. If you have 100 employees working 40 hours a week you are paying for 4,000 hours. Some of it is billable – value adding, hours customers will pay you for, essentially your direct labor. Some of it is invested – product engineering and process improvement. And much of it is waste – sitting in meetings, shuffling papers, feeding computers, sorting defects or moving inventory around. Your goal isn’t to eliminate the waste and cut the total hours – get rid of people. Rather, it is to keep the same 100 people on the payroll but have a greater percentage of the 4,000 hours doing things that are billable – things that create value for customers.”
7. I’m Against It! by Bruce Hamilton. “I’m frequently asked, “How do you deal with people that are against Lean?” My stock response is to quote Shigeo Shingo’s advice that “99% of objection is cautionary,” that is, persons who appear to vigorously object to Lean are really just asking for more information. I confess that, while this answer puts a positive spin on objection, depending upon who is doing the objecting, it doesn’t really answer the question.”
6. They’re People, Not Employees by Michael Ballé and Jim Huntzinger. “The first managerial revolution brought by lean practice is to assert that training one’s direct reports is the manager’s first priority. . . The second mission of the manager is therefore to constantly question what value actually means for customers and how workers build value into their product, service or software. . . Thirdly, visual management is a unique know-how that emerges out of lean tradition in order to make it easier to have employees learn on the job every day everywhere. . . Last but not least – indeed, we should probably start with this – morale matters enormously in knowledge work.”
5. Simon Sinek on The Celery Test: The Disadvantages of Best Practices by Tony Khoun. “The idea that copying WHAT or HOW things are done at high-performing organizations will inherently work for you is just not true. Like the Ferrari and the Honda, what is good for one company is not necessarily good for another. Put simple, best practices are not always best.”
4. Creating a Continuous Improvement Culture Requires More Than Logic by Gregg Stocker. “Changing a culture to one where improvement happens on a continual basis requires more than appealing to logic because it tends to run counter to common sense – at least when compared to the way most businesses operate. There are natural organizational and psychological barriers that interfere with the ability to improve on a continual basis. One of the most significant barriers is related to the way people think and approach work and, without a concerted effort to shift thinking toward a mindset of continual learning, efforts to improve will likely be fragmented, discontinuous, and difficult to sustain.”
3. Catalog Engineers and Value Stream Mapping by Pete Abilla. “You see at Toyota where I learned Lean, there is no value stream mapping. At least not as it’s understood in the “lean subculture” – what I call the Oprah-ization of Lean. At Toyota, the formal method is called information and material flow mapping. It’s actually a very specific approach to a very specific problem. But, for some reason, value stream mapping has become the de-facto approach to implement lean. I think that’s misguided at most. The so-called “lean consultants” love this approach because it’s package-able and very routine. But that’s the problem: neatly packaging Lean in this way has created droves of what Ohno called “Catalog Engineers“.”
2. The Fallacy of Firing People to Fix Patient Safety by Mark Graban. “If we fired all of the bad apples, safety would improve and patients wouldn’t be harmed, right? Let’s just figure out a way to predict WHO will cause an error… and proactively fire them. But, that doesn’t work, because in a bad system, any good person might be involved in an error (which is not the same as saying it’s “their fault.”) . . . If there are truly “bad apples” in the organization, isn’t that the organization’s fault for hiring them, or not training them properly, or not supervising them?”
And this week’s Friday Favorite from TheKaiZone goes to . . .
1. Despoiling the Respect for People Principle by Bob Emiliani. “Consultants and training organizations will create expensive “lead with respect” certifications to accelerate Lean leadership development. It will include classroom training, testing, and work projects, where success is narrowly defined to prove competency and to gain a new credential for the résumé. Soon, the credential will appear in job postings as a required qualification, as has long been the case for Lean tools certifications. This is wrong.”
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. Have a great weekend, friends!
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