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!

 

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!

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.  Doing Lean Versus Becoming Lean by Jim Luckman.  “Moving from “doing Lean” to “becoming Lean” is more than just a change in organizational objectives. It requires a mindset of curiosity and experimentation, a commitment to learning and reflection, and a willingness to focus on and build high quality relationships among the individuals in the organization. Sometimes “just do it” may be the right answer, but when it comes to Lean, true change comes from becoming a new kind of organization.”

9.  Making Learning a Habit by Gregg Stocker.  “For years we’ve been taught that learning takes place in a classroom where experts convey knowledge to students.  When looking at the value of classroom learning in terms of improving performance and competitiveness, though, it becomes evident that the connection is weak, at best.  And although there are some benefits to conferences, seminars, and in-house training classes, they are not the type of activities that drive team learning. “

8.  Are We “Doing Lean” All Wrong by Brent Wahba.  “Somewhere in Ohio is a small healthcare management company that is the best Lean company, EVER. . . Good scientists use more than just the Scientific Method – they also question their assumptions and understand the difference between correlation and causality. So far this company has achieved about 80% of the benefits of a sustained Lean transformation with only 20% of the effort and 5% of the religion. Are they really the best Lean company ever? To them they are and that’s all that matters.”

7.   If It’s Not About Flow Then It’s Not About Lean by Bill Waddell.  “In all of the noise and complexity around lean it can be easy to lose focus, but the bottom line when it comes to lean is that it is all about flow – increasing the rate of flow through the value stream from end to end – cycle time compression is the core of lean thinking and any possibility of lean success. All of the tools, techniques and philosophies . . . were designed as useful tools to facilitate increased flow rates; and if they are not used for that purpose there is little point in the long haul of using them at all.”

6.  A Problem is a Fact by Jon Miller.  “Language is the crystallization of thought. But the words we choose do more than just reflect our thought patterns–they shape them. What we say–and how we say it–can deeply affect a company’s culture. To change attitudes and behaviors, it helps to first change the vernacular. To spark innovation, it helps to influence the dialogue around new ideas.”

5.  The Toyota Production System (TPS), Philosophy, and DNA by Michel Baudin.  “I have the greatest respect for TPS, and have experienced its adaptability to industries ranging from making frozen foods to computers and aerospace.  And I understand that you can’t go to a hospital and tell administrators, doctors, and nurses that you are going to help them with a method for making cars. You not only have to adapt it, you must also present it in such a way that they will listen. For 25 years, the word “Lean” has been used for this purpose. It has also been abused, to leverage the respect inspired by TPS in order to promote unrelated ideas.”

4.  Look Inward for Root Causes by Bill Waddell.  “Gemba walking is only powerful when the gemba walkers – no matter what their level is in the organization – look to themselves for the root cause of problems, rather than look to others in the company to blame.”

3.  What Toyota Taught Me by Mark Reich.  “The most important lesson I have learned during my time at Toyota is that there is a lot of power in the development of the capabilities of people, and that the role of leadership in creating a culture of problem solving is critically important.”

2.  Can We Design Enjoyable Work? by Jeff Liker and Michael Ballé.  “Practically, rather than inventing enjoyable work from scratch, Toyota’s approach is to try to take away the least enjoyable aspects of work from every job, through the development of what they call “mutual trust”.”

I (literally) read thousands of blog posts every year.  It’s a rare occurrence that I feel compelled to print one out and take notes.  But that’s just what I did with this week’s Friday Favorite from Planet Lean, which is big on both inspiration and information:

1.  Achieving a Lasting Transformation by Nestor Gavilan.  “What determines the direction in which the business will ultimately go depends on the approach of top management: without winning the hearts and minds of people, nothing more than fast-disappearing results will be accomplished.”

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!