The KaiZone

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!

 

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.  Communicating with Respect by Alice Lee.  “Understanding who your audience is and what motivates them, why they’re interested in a particular problem, and where their learning level is what helps you hone your approach. Give people too much, too soon and you lose them. Give people too little, too late and along the way they will get bored and check out. In both cases, your colleagues won’t feel a connection with you and may not feel respected by you.”

9.  Often Skipped: Understand the Challenge and Direction by Mark Rosenthal.  “One of the reasons to set a clear target condition is to get away from general “waste safari” improvement efforts, and focus the improver’s attention on what must be done to get to the next level.  Without a sense of direction, it is easy for the improver to see every improvement opportunity (or none of them), and get locked up trying to find a way to fix them all.”

8.  Eliminate the Need for Heroics by Karen Martin.  “In the most extreme cases, organizations encourage fire fighting because they habitually reward the heroine or hero who saves the day and they do not reward the people working to prevent chaos. After all, chaos is exciting! It gets our juices flowing! But it’s all too easy to become an adrenaline junkie. Like any addiction, being hooked on adrenaline will bring you down.”

7.  Learning from John Wooden: Everyone is a Teacher and a Coach by John Shook.  “John Wooden was arguably the most successful, probably the most influential, and certainly the most studied coach in the history of US sports. His UCLA basketball teams won 11 national championships over a 13 year span. But, his influence is more than a matter of wins and losses. He spoke very little about “winning”. Winning – the final numbers of the scoreboard – was the result of a process, of doing things the right way. And it was the way he coached that made a difference and led to his phenomenal results.”

6.  Reading the Story of the Gemba by Matt Elson.  “One early lesson on my learning journey with the Toyota Production System was the concept of developing ”kaizen eyes”; the ability to see deeply and apply improvements to any process.  My mentor said that we have to learn how to “read” the “story” of the shop floor. . . BUT, beware!  Once you start thinking and “seeing” things with “kaizen eyes”, you can’t go back to “normal”…you see waste and problems everywhere!”

5.  The CEO Must Remove All Barriers to Lean, and Some Barriers Are People.  If One Person Must Leave the Company, Do So with Respect by Orry Fiume.  “In the early stages of a transformation, a small percentage of the workforce will “get it,” like it, and want to run with it. Likewise, a small percentage will hate it and try to block it at every opportunity. The tendency of the large percentage of workers in the middle will be to watch from the sidelines to see who wins. But in a Lean transformation process, true learning comes from doing—the more people that are involved in the doing, the greater the number of early successes, which then fuel additional efforts and create positive momentum. By not allowing people to opt out and by providing air cover for early adopters, the CEO can send a clear message that everyone is expected on the field, contributing to the effort.”

4.  So You Decluttered and Simplified . . . So What?  by Bill Waddell.  “The lean tools are great in their ability to free up time and capacity.  That is the easy part of lean.  Much trickier (and rarer) is the conversion of that capacity into sales growth.  The problem is that converting newly freed up capacity – whether it is value adding capacity or managerial and staff capacity to support higher levels of value adding – requires accounting and sales to be part of the plan and they have by and large missed the lean message entirely.”

3.  What Does a Lean Manager Do Differently? by Art Byrne.  “The lean leader’s vision for driving a successful turnaround is always based on the question: how high is up? (And in fact, how can we exceed this?)  The traditional manager may see this as an “inward focus“, but the lean leader understands it’s just the opposite.  Delivering the most value to your customers starts with continuously improving your own processes.”

2.  Every Termination is a Failure by Tracey Richardson.  “Every termination (at the time this took place) had to be reviewed by a high level Japanese executive.   The high level leader came in and stated the entire case with all the proper documentation records of the person up for termination.  The Japanese executive looked at everything carefully lifted his head up and asked the leader “have you done everything possible to make this person successful”?  The high level leader stated “yes I have”.   The Japanese executive said to the leader, “then you have failed”.”

And to celebrate the 50th post in the oh-so-brief history of The KaiZone, this week’s Friday Favorite goes to . . .   

1.  Please Bear with Us while We Work to Maintain Our Standards by Jon Miller.  “Maintaining standards is the most respectful and humble yet valuable of actions a leader can take. It is the first action before making  bold improvements. It is also one of the most boring actions. Many leaders, me included, have formed the bad habit of chasing after the new and exciting at the expense of standards on which the health of the business rests. We pay later and dearly for our immature and selfish choices through endless fire-fighting and repair work.”

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!