One of the reasons my wife and I enjoy traveling so much is because we’ve become convinced of the importance of first trying to understand differences before making judgments.  I guess we’re sort of going to the gemba on our worldview.  One example from right here in Morocco is how Islam is practiced as a positive, inclusive, compassionate religion – and they are appalled at how it has been corrupted to the contrary by the fringe fundamentalists.  Gee, sounds familiar.  As a side note, I’ve found the djellaba robe to be exceptionally comfortable, and I even bought one.  Not sure I’ll wear it to Walmart when I get home though.

The influence of Islam is pervasive, and one way it’s readily apparent is through the Adhan, the “call to prayer” that you hear the Muezzins chant five times a day, usually via loudspeakers high on the minaret in every mosque.  You might think that’s a bit annoying, but aside from issues resulting from poor amplification, it’s actually quite beautiful.  Here’s a YouTube version with English subtitles.

But think about this from a leadership perspective (yes, I finally got around to that…).  Five times a day Muslims are reminded of their faith and are asked to reflect on it.  And practicing Muslims will, whenever possible.  Upon hearing the call at one point yesterday, our tour guide asked for a moment, found a corner in a private room, and performed the ritual.  It only took a couple minutes.  Five times a day the distraction of daily chaos (especially in a place like Marrakech!) is realigned to a larger ideal and purpose.

Leadership can be tough.  Lean transformation and hence lean leadership even more so.  One of the greatest difficulties is keeping both the leader and the team focused on what can be counterintuitive goals.  Moving forward while grenades and distractions are being lobbed from all sides, trying to pull you back into a short-term mindset.

Take the time to discover and define the true purpose of the organization.  Translate that into a long-term strategy with short- and intermediate-term objectives.  Then communicate and reinforce that purpose, strategy, and thinking… over and over and over.

At least five times a day.

If you’re like most leaders, you probably find yourself operating in a virtual house-of-mirrors much of the time, with insufficient clarity around what your customers really think about the work you and your team deliver, how you’re really performing (especially operationally), and what’s really at the root of a problem. I guarantee that your employees are unclear not only about those issues, but also information that’s fundamental to outstanding performance, such as organizational priorities, what exactly they should be doing to further the organization’s goals, and who to go to for what. Creating ambiguity when it doesn’t need to exist is inefficient, costly, and disrespectful. Creating organization-wide clarity can be game changing. And you can lead the charge from wherever you sit in the organization.

While there are many areas where ambiguity commonly lurks, here are three areas you should begin with:

Annual goals & priorities

Ask your staff or 10 people around you what your organization’s annual goals and priorities are for the year and you will likely meet ambiguity head on. One person may think that her department’s key priority is to roll out a new product, whereas another may believe staff should focus on enhancements to existing products. People need to be clear about the organization’s direction in order to spend their time wisely and feel connected.

Work with your leadership team to gain and communicate clear goals by assuring these clarity-boosting elements are in place:

1. Consensus across the leadership team about what matters (ambiguity abounds when the VP of Sales believes that developing a new customer portal is the organization’s highest priority whereas the Human Resources VP believes developing and socializing organizational values is the most important project).
2. Specificity creates clarity. You need measurable objectives, not a nebulous goal: “capturing market share” is like “losing weight”–neither is likely to happen. The target should be quantifiable, be it dollars or pounds.
3. Effective communication means that you discuss goals and priorities directly, not in an email. If you’re not in a position to champion organization-wide clarity, then do it within your sphere of influence–your work team, department or division. Watch your performance soar when everyone is clear about what matters and why.

How Problems Get Solved

The single most important organizational capability is problem solving proficiency. But ambiguity often seeps into the process resulting in temporary solutions, remedies that create new problems, and expensive “fixes” to problems that could have been solved without investing capital. As I describe in my book, The Outstanding Organization, adopting a structured problem-solving methodology such as PDSA (plan-do-study-adjust) helps break the habit of rushing to solutions before the true nature of the problem is known with clarity-producing root cause analysis. So instead of thinking that your problem with poor or incomplete information on customer orders is your customer and building in an expensive and time-sapping review step to hand-hold, you will likely learn that your ordering process is unclear and convoluted, and that simplifying or reformatting your order form does the trick.

How Work Gets Done

In most organizations, no one person has a clear understanding about all of the steps in transforming a customer request into a good or service, which leads to ineffective decisions, interdepartmental blame, and sluggish performance. Sally may think Joe is lazy because he doesn’t give her complete information, but Joe may not understand Sally’s true needs. Begin today by selecting a key process, and map it step-by-step: who does what, when and how in the process. Look for opportunities to reduce rework, such as the rampant and unnecessary clarification that resides in most processes. Use a simple metric, like Percent Complete & Accurate (%C&A), to assess what percentage of time each person in the process has to clarify, add or correct the information they receive before they do their work. You’ll find that, in many cases, the people performing work have to stop and clarify the information receive (that could have been clear to begin with) over 50% of the time. By removing the need for this wasteful and frustrating step, you will boost productivity and morale (dealing with repetitive problems is a drain), and create the means for greater margins.

Adopting these ambiguity-busting actions enables you to infuse greater clarity into your organization. While some work groups, departments, or even entire organizations benefit from the declaring a “Campaign for Clarity,” other environments will benefit by adopting a more organic approach and reducing ambiguity one conversation, one report, one problem, and one process at a time. In either case, you have the power to begin reaping the financial and psychological benefits that accompany clarity. Today.

Throughout the history of progressive Lean management, its advocates have tried to do the same things over and over again to gain management’s interest in leading broad, fundamental change in leadership routines and business processes. When we fail, we keep doing the same things, only harder. This has been a losing proposition and illustrates how guessing at the causes of problems does not lead to answers.

This outcome suggests that we should utilize structured problem-solving processes. Yet doing so will be difficult because the problem is comprised of dozens of variables that intersect each other in both predictable and unpredictable ways. We simply may lack a problem-solving process with enough capability to identify the “zero-day” flaw(s) in human information processing that would, if corrected, lead many more leaders to embrace Lean management.

Read the rest of the article here.

The reaction to my book has been very favorable, and has given me the opportunity to speak with a great number of people engaged in lean work. And the one thing that has surprised me the most so far is the number of times that people have questioned whether lean is truly a strategy.  They ask me, “gee Art, you talk about lean as a strategy and not a collection of tools, why is that?” For someone who has always viewed lean as the most powerful strategic weapon ever invented this is pretty shocking to me.

I have been implementing Lean in more than 30 companies in 14 countries around the world since January of 1982. I have always done this as the CEO of a business. As a result, I have always looked at lean as a strategy—or to be more precise, an unfair competitive advantage that could vastly improve the results of my business. During my tenure as a Group Executive for The Danaher Corporation, the President of one of my Group companies, George Koenigsaecker , and I, were the drivers behind the introduction of lean within Danaher. We were trained in The Toyota Production System by the four founders of The Shingijutsu Company, all of whom had worked directly for Taichii Ohno, the father of TPS. The more we learned the more appreciation we had for what an incredible strategic weapon this approach represented.

After leaving Danaher I continued to implement lean in the various companies I have been responsible for. First as the CEO of The Wiremold Company, where we were able to increase the company’s enterprise value by just under 2,500% in ten years; and since as an Operating Partner with J.W. Childs Associates where I have been responsible for driving lean throughout our portfolio companies where our results have also been very good.

I realize that I should not be that surprised when people question the strategic value of lean. After all, even today, despite the growing acceptance of lean, it is most commonly called “lean manufacturing”. This allows it to be seen as just “some manufacturing thing” that can be delegated down to the VP of Operations and not effect the rest of the company. We reinforce this with the fact that the majority of the books that have been written about lean focus on what we commonly see as “tools”: How to Run a Kaizen, How to Achieve Visual Control, How to do TPM, How to Implement SMED, How to Create a Kanban System, etc.

This approach, unfortunately, gives people the impression that they can just select the tool that fits them best, pull it off the shelf and shazam they are lean. Six sigma is a great example here. Many companies have tried to build this lean tool into something much bigger than it is. The result of this mentality is that company after company starts down the lean path for the wrong reasons—such as cutting headcount. Leadership believes that they can just drop lean on top of an existing “batch” structure (as opposed to a “flow” approach) and be successful. This of course will never work. You can’t be lean, for example, if Operations is trying to create flow while Sales is left to continue to bring in large batch orders. Likewise you can’t be lean if Operations is trying to reduce inventory while Finance insists on Standard Cost Accounting which incentivizes the building of inventory.

Seeing lean as the most strategic thing you can do challenges some deeply held beliefs by most business leaders. Most managers are groomed to see strategy as big-picture ideas or dramatic moves to gain advantage in the marketplace. The role of the leader is to sit in a fancy office, conceive brilliant tactical approaches, and rarely if ever visit the shop or office floor where the actual work takes place. This “heroic” approach simply doesn’t have room for the idea that improving your value-adding activities is fundamentally strategic. In fact, most companies take their value adding activities for granted. If, for example, they have a six week lead time they assume that this can’t be changed so they try and create a strategy that can overcome this obstacle. And yet using Lean to improve all your processes (for example, to achieve lower costs, better quality, shorter lead times, and better customer service, plus freeing up lots of space and cash to reinvest for future growth) will profoundly boost your ability to execute on what you now consider to be “strategic” initiatives. And you will create a wealth of new strategic options (such as offering a two-day lead time while the rest of your competitors are still at six weeks) that you would not have even seen as possible before changing your value-adding approach.

Leaders also have trouble recognizing that lean is strategic because doing so forces them out of their comfort zone—pushing them to fully adopt this new way of working. To really be lean everything has to change and everyone has to be on board. Lean is a team sport. Done correctly it is a time-based growth strategy that will allow you to gain market share even in slow growth economies like the present one. The things that you do to improve your value adding and become lean also reduce the time it takes to do everything. Companies that can compete on time are very hard to beat. I think that the more companies and CEO’s that we can get to see lean as the strategy the more successful our overall society can be.

——

Art Byrne is currently an Operating Partner with J. W. Childs Associates L.P.. Prior to joining Childs he was the CEO of the Wiremold Company, a Group Executive at The Danaher Corporation and held General Manager Positions at The General Electric Company.  Wiremold won a Shingo Prize under Art’s leadership and Art was inducted into The Shingo Academy. Recently he was inducted to the Industry Week Magazine Manufacturing Hall of Fame and his book The Lean Turnaround was published by McGraw-Hill.

If we look at this problem from middle managers’ perspective, we would see more than just two causes that contribute to the problem perceived by senior managers. Middle managers would say:

• I don’t understand Lean management.
• I don’t know what to do.
• My boss does not support Lean.
• My boss does not practice Lean.
• Lean is for operations people; I’m not in operations.
• There are no rewards or recognition for doing Lean.
• Lean is just another demand placed upon me. It’s a burden.
• There is nothing in it for me.
• I am afraid of losing my job.
• I fix things; continuous improvement is continuous re-work.
• I don’t like rapid change.
• I am worried about failing and the consequences.
• Top management wants “flawless execution” and says “failure is not an option.”
• I fear being blamed for bad outcomes.
• My job description has not changed.
• I don’t have time for Lean.
• I keep forgetting what to do.
• My boss holds me accountable for results.
• My peers are not doing Lean and they still get rewarded.
• Annual performance appraisal criteria have not changed.
• Promotion criteria have not changed.
• I am held accountable to the same old metrics.
• There is much more going on here than just resistance or fear of change. Lean transformations that go too slowly suffer from structural problems, not from a middle manager problem.

It is clear that the problem is an absence of problem-solving by senior managers. They must clarify the perceived problem because it is different from the actual problem(s). The actual problem correlates better with senior managers not having done the work necessary to set middle managers up to succeed.

Senior managers need to do an A3 report for this problem to understand root causes, and also to eliminate blame. If they did so, they would find numerous causes for the narrow effect that they perceive, and nearly every cause they find would require a corrective action – all of which would be relatively simple. Three things stand out with respect to slow Lean transformations:

• Senior management inconsistency.
• Lack of specificity regarding new roles, responsibilities, and daily activities.
• Poor understanding of Lean principles and practices by senior managers, which impedes their ability to explain and teach Lean management to middle managers.

In most Lean transformations, senior managers do not do the things they expect middle managers to do. Senior managers support Lean, but they do not act as role models by applying Lean principles and practices to their own work and other work activities (by participating in kaizen). To say Lean is important and then personally do nothing says it all: “Lean is for lower-level people to do, not me.” It also says that Lean management is not that important. Senior managers willingly throw away a great opportunity to lead by example. This is an obvious leadership problem that must be corrected.

Senior managers must be explicit regarding what middle managers should do differently day-to-day. That means, in part, addenda to all job descriptions that include (as a starting point):

• Eliminate waste, unevenness, and unreasonableness.
• Use problem-solving tools (i.e. A3 reports).
• Create visual controls.
• Improve flow, then improve it again and again.
• Respect people: employees, suppliers, customer, investors, and communities.

Of course, senior managers must do these same things in their own work activities if they expect middle managers to do them in theirs. The expectation should be established that middle managers will describe these new activities at least weekly at the gemba (not in a conference room), and that senior managers will show evidence of their efforts to solve problems and improve processes to all employees (seeing, after all, is believing). Expectations, of course, must be followed up with concrete actions.

Senior managers must also be able to explain how Lean management makes middle manager’s job better and easier. If middle managers perceive Lean to make their job more difficult or worse, then one cannot expect them to embrace Lean management. Senior managers frequently pile requirements onto middle managers with no indication of what activities can be eliminated. This leaves middle managers to decide what is important and what is not important. In most cases, middle managers will continue to do only what they are used to doing – especially if anti-Lean metrics remain in place.

What I have tried to illustrate here is that senior managers have a lot of work to do. They cannot simply proclaim the adoption of Lean management and then walk away from it or pretend to be interested during monthly reviews. Senior managers have to be part of it. They have to recognize that non-zero-sum (win-win) Lean is not a minor change to what they already know about people, work, organization, management, and leadership. It’s back to school. If that is too big a challenge for them, then they should not adopt Lean management.

Mac Davis

If you’ve answered the question with, “Absolutely yes, I am a very humble leader”, you probably are not.  But don’t get me wrong … humility, should not be confused with confidence.  In fact, perhaps the two greatest assets a Lean Leader, a Change Agent, an Innovation Pioneer, or a Continuous Improvement Champion can have are to be both confident and humble, or quietly confident.  So, while the assertion of “Absolutely yes, I am a very humble leader” displays an immense amount of confidence, a quietly humble person would have more likely answered, “I believe I am, but it is best that you ask those who work for me with since they are on the receiving end of my direction.”  This same person would have been confident in his own humility but open and interested in the responses from those who work for him and willing to accept the criticism and even possibly change.  He also would have known that the most accurate and truthful answers would not come from him, but from those who work with him.

But why is humility important to lead a successful lean effort?  Well a true Lean (or continuous improvement) Transformation requires change to the very foundation, structure, culture, business practices, organization, metrics, and perhaps even the very principles upon which the organization is based.    If the organization is to truly transform and the organization is oftentimes a reflection of the leaders who run the organization, then the leaders need to be open to transform the way they manage and lead the organization.  In order to be open to change, then one needs to humble, realize that he does not know it all, hire the right people, and allow them to drive the bus.  A CEO needs to be open-minded to different ways of operating the business, regardless of past success, and open to criticism.  A CEO needs to learn from others because the others know so much and he girder them as his Subject Matter Experts.

A CEO needs to realize that he is not “perfect in every way”, nor should he be.

CEO Does Not Stand for Chief Ego Officer

A true leader sets the example for others to follow.  If a CEO is pushing change, through a Lean Transformation and expects others to change, that same CEO must show that he is willing to change as well.

Continuous Improvement is not just about improving organizations,

it is about improving people,

 and it all starts with you improving yourself!

As Art Byrne, former CEO of Wiremold wrote in The Lean Turnaround, “If the CEO won’t change his ways and become totally engaged (become the company’s Lean Zealot), then there is little, if any, chance of turning any company around using the Lean principles.”

In Good to Great, Jim Collins discusses leadership qualities that distinguish Level 5 (the highest level for leadership effectiveness) CEOs of the Good to Great companies to CEOs of companies that never made it to great status.  One of those attributes of Level 5 CEOs is, as you’ve probably guessed by now, humility.  Of the 11 companies that met the tough criteria of being a good company for years and then almost overnight transforming itself to a “great” company for a sustained period of time, they all had level 5 leaders who were humble and hardly known in the business world, much less the consumer world.  Most of us would never have even heard of them. They were the anti-Lee Iacocca’s of the business world, happy at running a successful business without having to proclaim it to the rest of the world.

Can humility be taught?

I believe everything can be taught, if the learner is open to learning and has the desire to do so.  A humbling experience oftentimes will or can create that willingness to learn.  Running a company into the ground, losing a major customer or contract, loss of close friends, divorce, or getting fired can all be humbling experiences that may provide the desire to learn about humility and reassess who you are as an individual.

But, what if you do not have that humbling experience and let’s face it: if you are a CEO and have experienced a great deal of success throughout your lifetime, you do begin to feel that you are perfect in every way and therefore it’s hard to be humble – very hard.  The EGO expands to such levels that it becomes the sole explanation as to why the company has been so successful.  The EGO then actually impairs the vision of being even more successful or the possibility of changing the organization with changing times and customer demands.

One begins to think … OK, so Toyota has been extremely successful over the years.  Let’s copy the tools they use.  Let’s get our people to change the way they work.  Toyota was successful because of these tools.  They can work inside our organization too. In this way, we don’t have to change management styles, leadership, the organization, our principles, or our culture.  These are the things they I created and they are good.  I don’t have to change either because I have always been successful.  We just have to change the tools we use, just like going out and buying a new ratchet set.  We definitely don’t need an organizational change.

Or, in extreme cases, one might think …so what if Toyota has had great success, so have we.  They are in a different industry – that stuff doesn’t work in our industry.  Toyota can learn a thing or two from us, if people only knew about us.  We’re good for now and there’s no need to change.

Past success is the greatest deterrent to change.

The biggest killer of improvement of any sort is the EGO and we are all subject to its uninterrupted growth unless we have mechanisms to control its growth.  But how?  A large EGO stems from a lack of self-confidence or self-esteem, which almost seems counter-intuitive.  How do we overcome such a strong force as the lack of our own self-esteem? Perhaps you can start here…

1)    Convince yourself that Humility is a good thing.  Read about Level 5 leadership in Good to Great. Think of the people you admire whether they are friends, relatives, business associates, acquaintances, world leaders, religious figures, pastors, or historical figures.  Think of the athletes you’ve listened to being interviewed.  Do you respect the egocentrics or those who are humble and appreciative of his teammates?  Think of how great you felt as a youngster when someone shared a success story and gave you a lot of the credit.  Also, think about how low you felt when someone stole the credit from you and lauded themselves for your efforts.  Humility is a good thing!

2)    This is the hard part.  Assess your current level of humility.  This is your current state.  Be mindful of how often you interrupt people.  Be mindful of how often you tell someone what to do rather than ask them for their ideas.  Be mindful of the how often you use the word “I” instead of “we”. Be mindful of how often you think that the people who work for you are a bunch of idiots.  Be mindful how often you feel that you have to do someone else’s work because you have no faith or trust in him.

Then, most importantly, discuss with several people, perhaps a mentor, a true friend that does not hold back the truth, a parent, a spouse, an old respected boss, how they would rate your humility level.  But first, before they rate you, tell them how important you feel humility is and why you think it is important to be humble.  Then ask them for their rating on a 1 – 10 scale.  Perhaps you can ask them to envision the pain scale in a hospital room.  A 10 is no humility and lots of pain for everyone else.  What is your Humility rating?

3)    Now, in the spirit of continuous improvement, it is time to change.  This transformation will not only be good for the people in the organization, but it will also be good for your own health.

• Volunteer (outside of work)!  A University of Ottawa study showed that egocentrism–or thinking only of yourself–is a major contributor to depression. So what’s the cure? Thinking about others. Donating your time to charity lowers depression and anxiety levels, finds a University of Texas study. And you only have to volunteer once a month to give your life a greater sense of purpose, according to research from Duke University and the National University of Singapore.
• At work, practice what Dr. W. Edwards Deming tried to teach us. He said that a Leader understandshis three sources of power and uses them appropriately.  They three sources are:

i.     Authority of office

ii.     Knowledge

iii.     Personality and persuasive power; tact

Dr. Deming discussed that a true leader develops his own “knowledge” and the “knowledge” of those who report to him and fully develops and utilizes his own “persuasive power” to convince others of the righteous path. A leader does not rely on “authority of office”.  A CEO who relies on the “authority of office” tells his people to do what he says because he is the boss.  In Lean Lingo, we would call this a “push” system, in that the only reason why people are moving ahead on the boss’ orders is because he is the boss.  There is no wisdom gained or knowledge learned as to why the path they are taking is the right path, or even if it is the right path.

A true leader would know of the wisdom in using a “pull” system to convince people through knowledge and tact of the righteous path so that they all desire to go down that path willingly and passionately because they believe in it and understand why it’s the right.   A true leader only uses his authority of office to obtain the resources for those who work for him to get the job done in accordance with the mission, vision, and principles of the company.

• At work, if you need to stroke your ego, develop a sense for and develop your abilities for hiring people who are better or more knowledgeable than you, and tell them how good you are at hiring only the best people in the industry, including them. Teach them of the direction and the principles of the company and of Lean, and then get out of the way and let them do what you hired them to do.    Jim Collins referred to this as getting the right people on the bus.  Let them drive the bus and trust them to do their job as you support them with the resources they need to get the job done, while still be actively involved through the Gemba.
• Learn to trust your instincts of whom you hired and learn to trust the people you hired!
• Learn to let go of control.  Most people say this is the hardest part for any CEO to learn and nearly impossible, if she is the original founder of the company.  But, it is absolutely necessary if the company is going to continue to grow.
• Respect the people whom you’ve hired and build in systems that respect all employees.  Also, destroy any business practices that currently do not support the respect of people.  If you haven’t noticed by now, every single Lean “tool”  has a an element of respecting people and encouraging their involvement whether it is Training Within Industry (TWI), 5S, A3, SMED, Value Stream Mapping, Visual Management, Gemba Walks, or Mistake-Proofing.

4)    Learn how to Lead!  You may know how to manage and you may even know how to micromanage, but you may not know how to lead.  Respecting people is also about realizing that every person has something to contribute to the good of the company.  It is about giving everyone the chance to voice their opinions and develop solutions.  As a humble leader, you must learn to ask questions, not provide answers.  You must learn how to be a leader, a coach and a mentor.  You must drop your talents for “micromanaging”, because micromanaging is a killer to internal passion and it is the opposite of leadership.  The last person to know he is a micromanager is himself.  Are you also blind to your micromanaging qualities?  Ask those same people you asked to rate you on your humility quotient.

You must also realize that you do not know it all and that you cannot manage a business and lead people from a board room, a conference room, or an office.  You must go to the Gemba and be open minded about what you can further learn from the people.  You must see their pain, their frustrations, and their desires for the future.

5)    Find a way to continue to evaluate your effectiveness as a leader and your humility quotient and to always and continuously improve yourself. Never give up and never lose your focus on becoming a more humble leader and person.

That’s because the “more” that I want while on vacation is actually less.  I don’t want to wonder if the hotel will be clean, if the bed will be comfy, if breakfast will be tasty, if the hotel will be in the right part of town, if the internet will be reliable, if I can get something to eat at 3am when recovering from jet lag, and especially if the room will be quiet.  Four Seasons does this – everything is perfect, and perfectly consistent, every time.  In years I have yet to have a single complaint.

And yes, like with most top tier hotels, I could tell you stories that would amaze you, even if they don’t necessarily add any intrinsic value.  Such as being met by Four Seasons at the gate (INSIDE security) at the Hong Kong airport, whisked through a special immigration line while your fellow travellers are asking what rock band my wife and I must belong to, and out a side door to their limo so we’re at the hotel before most people have cleared customs.  Or arriving at their Singapore hotel, checking in in the room (like at most Four Seasons), going straight down to the bar and having the waiter greet you by name – literally 5 minutes after check in.  At their Costa Rica resort last April a pool boy greeted me by name and told me how one of the medical products my company makes has helped his daughter.  I learned the staff reviews Linked In profiles of guests while on the bus into work.  Value?  Maybe not.  But still pretty cool.

For that perfection I do pay more – sometimes double or even triple.  But while on vacation it’s worth it to me… to think less.  There’s compensating value to me.  As a bonus I also almost always learn something about service – or even about lean – so I’m tempted to write off part of the bill as a business expense. Note to IRS auditors reading this: I’ve never actually done this.

Finally to the real story of this post.  I’m having a quiet breakfast this morning at the Four Seasons in Bangkok after arriving late the previous evening after a long day of traveling from the US.  My table is at the side of the open atrium so I get to watch the staff in action.  I’ve always been amazed by how the staff at their hotels – whether at the restaurants or elsewhere – will be at your side exactly the instant you need them, but are also never annoyingly intrusive.  Now I know.

Amidst the flurry of wait staff running around, I noticed that there was always at least one person just standing – and watching.  Not always the same person, but there was always one.  Just looking around the room at all the customers – and the rest of the staff.  If a customer looked up and looked around indicating they needed something, instantly that wait person went over and another person took over the watching and looking.  If a line started to form (ie, more than one person) at the front of the restaurant, the person would head over and help with the seating.  And someone else would take over the watching.

Someone was always standing, observing, and watching.

So I looked up and to the side, and instantly a waiter was at my side.  I asked what he was watching for, and his response?  “Just observing, sir.”  Yes, “just” observing.  That “just” has become one key to their exceptional customer service.  I wanted to ask if process improvements were identified and acted on, but that’s when the language barrier kicked in.

Taiichi Ohno would be proud.

Lean types know of the “Ohno circle” concept.  Go to the gemba, and “just” stand and observe.  15, 30, 60 minutes – whatever it takes.  In fact, he would tell people that if they haven’t observed something that needed to be improved, they should go out and stand longer.  How often do you, and your team, take the time to simply observe?  How often do you go out to your shop floor and just stand and watch the process?

When you rush around focused on firefighting and fixing things, you miss the nuance of the process.  Or, in the case of Four Seasons, a tiny shift of a customer’s eyes that indicate they might need something.

Take some time to “just” observe.  Better yet, make it part of the ongoing routine of you and your staff.

Included in the article is the assertion, “Narratives of industry evolution often represent fairy tales constructed by corporate financiers, or ambitious chief executives.” I would add to that, ‘fairly tales constructed by business school professors and other gurus’.

The idea that business folks rationalize the status quo when challenged with game changing products is valid enough, but it is just as valid – even more so perhaps – that corporate financiers, ambitious (and otherwise) chief executives – and especially management gurus in institutions that have built their reputations, careers and bank accounts on the status quo construct fairly tales to rationalize the status quo when confronted with a different management paradigm. How else are we to explain the Toyota versus General Motors domination swap?

Over the years, General Motors management proffered explanations for their eroding market share and profits ranging from Toyota ‘buying market share’, the Japanese government underwriting Toyota, GM’s hourly wage agreements, their structural costs and their legacy costs … everything but the idea that Toyota was managing by a completely different set of principles. One by one all of those explanations were corrected, at no small expense to all of GM’s stakeholders – employees, suppliers, customers, communities and American taxpayers – yet GM is still the same struggling mess lurching from solution to solution it was twenty years ago.

The gist of the FT article is a theory concerning the failure of many mergers and acquisitions intended to counter the industry disruption new products have created. It says, “Established companies in an industry are naturally resistant to disruptive innovation, which threatens their existing capabilities and cannibalizes their existing products. A collection of all the businesses which might be transformed by disruptive innovation might at first sight appear to be a means of assembling the capabilities needed to manage change. In practice, it is a means of gathering together everyone who has an incentive to resist change.”

Take a look at this rogues gallery from the good professor’s web site. What is it if not a “gathering together everyone who has an incentive to resist change”? What has this group done to challenge the long standing basic principles of management assumed to be irrefutable by their colleagues and decades of graduates from the schools paying their salaries? The answer is nothing. By and large, this group still believes that GM can put itself right with innovative products, and that its management methods and processes are just fine.

The ‘fairy tales’ told by the professional management cult wholly ignore the fact that, while Toyota did a lot of good things in the course of running roughshod over General Motors cranking out disruptive, game changing, industry redefining products is not one of them.

Get a load of the management disruption this video from a small company called Aluminum Trailers in an out of the way place in northern Indiana. ATC is doing to the small trailer industry what Toyota to the auto industry and, as the video shows, they are doing it by taking a fundamentally different approach to management. I can imagine what sort of intellectual fairly tales the professional management cult would construct to rationalize ATC.

The professional management experts break the fundamental rule of lean – they miss Dr Deming’s essential point. Failure is ascribed to personal failing, rather than flawed processes. If the company is doing poorly, the problem is the CEO and his lack of vision, charisma, leadership skills, knowledge of strategy, inability to comprehend financial ratios, ignorance of brand management essentials, etc…, etc…, etc… How such idiots came to be CEO’s – an extraordinary occurrence – is never explained. Of course they are not idiots, they are very intelligent people, but they are executing incapable management processes.

Of course innovative products can be very disruptive – the high tech world proves that routinely. Of course supply chain innovation can be extremely disruptive – just look at P&G founder about to respond to Dollar Shave Club, and Walmart grapple with Amazon. And of course the folks whose careers are vested in the old model often look foolish and go down hard.

Management innovation is just as disruptive – more so than products because most companies can catch up if they are behind the product curve while clinging to a failed management model is often a death sentence. Those steeped in old management thinking sooner or later look just as foolish and go down just as hard, whether they are executives, financiers … or award winning college professors.

10. He initiated a brand new lean department.

His thinking: Lean is something new. We don’t want to taint it with our quality or production departments. Quality has nothing to do with lean, and quality’s been around for such a long time that it’s kind of dull. Besides, the quality department has that ISO standard; they get to keep it going because our customers think we need to have it and demand that we do. Lean has kaizen. That’s not even part of the ISO thing. The production department doesn’t have time for lean. They have to focus on expediting orders and getting them out the door—especially that last week, every month. Lean and kaizen would interrupt this flow. I think I’ll set up the lean department’s office right next to the Six Sigma department; that’s dying out anyway.

9. She thinks one-piece flow only applies to production.

Her thinking: I get one-piece flow for manufacturing stuff or creating a service, but the thought of applying that concept to management or leadership is silly. So silly, in fact, I’ve never even thought of it. What would I do then… monitor the process every day instead of at the monthly meeting? That’s not gonna happen. Would I provide feedback and be open to my staff every day, like one-piece flow, instead of how I currently batch all of my performance reviews, once a year, at the end of the year? Fat chance. Would I conduct management review meetings more than twice a year? Yeah, right.

8. He thinks that monthly kaizen events are the key to lean.

His thinking: That’s enough sacrifice. One big ol’ kaizen event, with five or eight employees, once a month… we’ll pick a different area each month. It makes sense. We’ll batch-process our improvement efforts to get rid of batch processing. It makes sense to me.

7. She thinks that she and her staff don’t have to change their management or leadership styles and practices.

Her thinking: Lean is for the little people. Lean is a little word that little people can understand. We have a solid management team and controls in place to keep everyone in line. People are written up and reviewed when they screw up. They’re afraid of making mistakes—as they should be. But this lean could help to avoid mistakes. Yes, lean will be a nice thing for them to work on. I’ll authorize the spending of a little money; that will be how I show support. And we’ll reap the gains.

6. He thinks that we should start lean off quickly and apply an easy tool, like 5S, right away, to the messiest area in production.

His thinking: Lean is like a big old toolbox. We need to get started, and we need a quick win. So let’s get trained and start 5Sing all over the place. We’ll do the whole building, whether it needs it or not, just so everyone will learn.  In fact, we can have a 5S Super Team, and it can go into new areas and do 5S in that area. We’ll do “sort” first, all over the building, before we get into “set in order.” Someone said that we should understand the problem first and do root cause analysis before choosing to use a lean tool. I should fire him for insubordination and trying to block our lean efforts. Stupid!

5. She thinks she’ll be “process focused” by ensuring measures are in place to monitor the process and have reports sent to her once a month.

Her thinking: There’s no need to get in the trenches and see the process. I can do all of that from my nice comfy office and conference rooms. The data will let me know what I need to know. It’s all in there. I’ll ensure that my people are accountable to reach my mandated objectives and goals, and we’ll review the numbers together, once a month. Besides, I wouldn’t want to intimidate my employees by periodically showing up in their work areas and watching what goes on. That’s not very pleasant for your people, and we are a people-oriented company.

4. He thinks that value streams only apply to the lean tool of value-stream mapping.

His thinking: Our functional department organization is good. Many of our department managers have been with the company a long time. They have built their kingdoms, and they’re proud of them. We can’t mess this up. Besides, it’s kind of neat to watch the internal rivalries as they compete for resources and my attention. To reorganize to something like a matrix in which people are actually focused on and work for a value stream would be way too disruptive. That would be like breaking up the Chicago Bears-Green Bay Packers rivalry! That wouldn’t be any fun. We’ve got to maintain our departmental structure.

3. She thinks lean means lean manufacturing.

Her thinking: What, apply lean in the office? Like that’s gonna happen. What are we going do… use 5S for the training room, the copy room, and the network? Right. How about we put office workers in “work cells” as if they were handing work off to each other every day? That’s crazy; office work isn’t like production work. Next thing you know, someone will suggest that we watch people work in their cubicles to see the process; now that would be uncomfortable. Or another brainiac will suggest we provide each employee with a printer to avoid the waste associated with our centralized copier/fax/scanner/printer machine. Can you imagine visual management boards in the office? No, lean will stay in production where it belongs.

2. He thinks, regardless of the lean endeavor, the company will continue to invest in the latest technology, hardware, and software to stay ahead of the competition.

His thinking: Technology is the key to staying ahead of the competition. We’ve got to be on the cutting edge of software solutions, hardware, and equipment. When there are problems, we’ll buy more technology. Technology can solve our problems. It’s more important than training people. This is a very important point: New equipment is considered an asset that can be depreciated over time; training people shows up as an expense. That decision is a no-brainer. Also, we can test any technology in-house; we’ll be the beta site. It’s all about trying new things out for the sake of just doing it and staying ahead of the competition. It’s not what’s best for our people. We’ll tell them what’s best for them.

1. She thinks that all management decisions will still be based on meeting short-term financial goals.

Her thinking: Lean does not change this at all. In fact, I want to see a financial return for all this lean training within three years, or we will scrap the whole program. Any suggested improvements will continue going through our intensive Capital Appropriation Program. We still have to meet our monthly, quarterly, and annual financial goals, no matter what. I don’t care if we have to break our backs during the last week of any time period to get the shipments out the door; we will do it. We will not invest in any frivolous long-term scheme if it hurts our short-term numbers. Why? The board will be ticked off, and I could lose my job. Simple.

The “IndustryWeek/Manufacturing Performance Institute Census of Manufacturers,” released in November 2007, showed that nearly 70 percent of all plants in the United States used lean as an improvement methodology. Only 2 percent of companies who responded to the survey had fully achieved their objectives, and less than one-quarter of all companies (24%) reported achieving significant results. That leaves 74 percent of responding companies admitting they were not making good progress with lean.

I wonder why.

[Reprinted with permission - Quality Digest and Mike Micklewright]

Yes, that’s a certificate lauding completion of various 5S activities… except the last one: sustain.  And from the mess in the background you can see what happened.

Sustaining improvement – lean or otherwise – is difficult.  How many of us are on a diet… again?  Needing to clean the garage… again?  In fact, sorting and straightening and all that is really the easy part.  Doing it day after day is tough.

Three sources of the difficulty come to mind.  The first is the lack of a plan to sustain the improvement.  How often will it be done?  How will it be monitored?  5S is often sustained through audits and daily checklists, even after it becomes ingrained in expectation and even culture.

But such plans are meaningless if there isn’t also leadership commitment.  Are managers and supervisors holding themselves and others accountable to the sustaining plan?  What happens when the plan isn’t followed?

However ultimately there won’t be leadership commitment if there isn’t a solid understanding of why the improvement program is happening in the first place.  I’ve seen innumerable organizations, including mine, go down the path of “we must do this or that program”… without understanding why.  I even know of one organization that I won’t identify (cough… mine… cough) that once long ago had a goal to implement two lean tools per year.  We learned our lesson.  What is the problem or opportunity, what is the desired future state, and what is the best tool or program to achieve that future state?

To sustain an improvement program you need a solid plan.  For that plan to be effective you need leadership commitment.  For there to be leadership commitment there needs to be a solid reason and understanding of why the improvement is needed – and important – in the first place.  The power of Why.