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!

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!

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!