Aussie & Kiwi Chronicles - Part 5

Can High Cost Countries Afford Bad Management?

By Pascal Dennis

In my earlier blogs I wrote about my misadventures with Qantas.

A major national airline, indifferent to its customers, wracked by poisonous labor relations, the butt of cynical jokes at home.

Which raises another question:

Can Australia, a high-cost country overly dependent on mineral wealth & capricious mineral markets, afford bad management?

Much enjoyed exploring such questions with my Aussie mates, while sampling splendid wine.

Australia, they told me, is terribly vulnerable to bad management, and to bozo unions & nitwit politicians.

In good times, high mineral prices mask these debilitating weaknesses, which tend to fester.

When mineral prices collapse, as they always do, the economy follows.

A high cost economy cannot afford bad management. Resource wealth is only a temporary buffer, and might even be a curse.

High cost countries that lack natural resources - such as Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, and even Japan - seem much more resilient.

Bad managers, bozo unions and nitwit politicians seem to have shorter half-lives in such countries.

(Japan may be an exception, at least with respect to the latter...)

My Danish colleagues tell me, "We realize we are small, unimportant, and vulnerable. We learn to become self-reliant, and to get along."

Or, as my Aikido sensei used to say, "The knife is sharpened on the stone, Pascal-san..."

Cheers

Dangerous Lessons from Steve Jobs

By Pascal Dennis

It Depends...

Fine piece in Forbes about the danger of blindly emulating a genius

Steve Jobs famously said, in effect, "Ignore customers, they don't know what they want!"

Not unreasonable, if you're designing undreamed-about consciousness-shifting, behavior-changing products like the IPod and IPad.

But not the best approach if you're designing the next generation of Tier 4 diapers, or the next Ford Taurus model!

And certainly not the best approach if you're leading a team in the middle of a major health care, or automotive, or aerospace value stream!

In such circumstances, your upstream & downstream connections with customers & suppliers, are the air you breathe.

So, as with so many things in life - it depends...

Steve Jobs was right under his circumstances, to more or less ignore the customer.

And the value stream leader, in her circumstances, is right not to.

Some people call this finesse.

Best,

Pascal

Safety Comes First

By Al Norval

As students of Lean, I’m sure we’re all familiar with the House of Lean from Toyota. It has Standards & Stability as its foundation; JIT and Jidoka as its pillars and Toyota’s True North as its roof. The True North consists of three elements:

• Highest Quality
• Lowest Cost
• Shortest Leadtime

When I present this image I often get a question from the audience that goes something like this – What about Safety?

It’s a great question since in Lean we teach Safety Comes First. By Safety we don’t just mean personal safety and the prevention of accidents and harm to individuals, Safety Comes First goes deeper than that. It means providing an environment that is emotionally safe and intellectually safe as well. It means creating working conditions where people are free from harassment and bullying; where people are encouraged and able to contribute and become the best they can be. It means thinking about Safety as it applies throughout the entire Value Stream; product safety for Customers, material safety with Suppliers and extends to Contractors and Temporary and Casual workers as well. In fact Safety Comes First covers everything we do.

By taking this holistic view of Safety, we truly live the principle of “Respect for People” and in doing so can fully engage people to drive continuous improvement.

So why isn’t it part of the roof of the House of Lean?

It’s so basic to our thinking about Lean, that if we need to remind ourselves or others about it, we’re not at the level of thinking we need to be at as Leaders in a Lean environment.

I’ve been in many organizations that talk about Safety but when you go to Gemba you find out that Productivity truly comes first. Examples include people by-passing machine guarding to keep the product flowing, people taking short cuts to save minutes of downtime, people putting themselves in harm’s way just to meet the production targets. These organizations talk about Safety & Lean but don’t embody them.

When they finally understand that Lean is all about people, and to engage the hearts and minds of people we need to understand “Respect for People”, then they’ll understand why Safety Comes First.

Lean Fundamentals & Strategy Deployment

By Pascal Dennis

Strategy Deployment makes problems visible.

The core process steps are:

1. Develop the Plan
2. Deploy the Plan
3. Monitor the Plan
4. Improve the system

Each step entails a deep, shared understanding of Lean fundamentals.



To develop a good Plan, for example, we need to Go See and grasp the situation thereby.

But this is difficult if our visual management and information flow are poor.

It'll be doubly hard if our managers hide problems because of dysfunctional mental models.

Similarly, improving the system requires a solid understanding of Practical Problem Solving and root cause analysis.

Sustaining improvements entails locking in improvements with 5 S, standardized work.

Weak fundamentals are perhaps the most common failure Strategy Deployment failure mode.

In summary, please supplement your Strategy Deployment efforts with a broad development of Lean skills - for front line team members, as well as senior leaders.

And remember, since Lean is all too clear, it takes time to grasp.

Best regards,

Pascal

Jidoka

By Pascal Dennis

Building quality into the process, aka Jidoka, is a cornerstone of the Toyota Production System.

And embedded tests are a cornerstone of Jidoka.

To make a good product, or provide a good service, I need:

1. A clear picture of what good is (i.e. a Standard)
2. Quick feedback on how I'm doing right now, and
3. A way of getting back to a good condition

Embedded tests address element 2, and should be

• Simple,
• Low cost, and
• Binary (i.e. OK/Not OK)

What's the best source of embedded tests?

Wait for it...front-line team members.

Who knows the work better?

Who else has absorbed the 'nicks & knacks of the work'?

That's why Total Involvement is the heart of the Lean Business System.

Without it, the system is akin to a beautiful sailboat - without any wind.

Which leads us to Respect for People, another central tenet, and the topic of an upcoming blog.

Best regards,

Pascal

Two Pillars of the Lean Business System

By Pascal Dennis

Continuous Improvement and Respect for People - big ideas that deserve to capital letters!

These reflect the infinite finesse of the Lean Business System.

They are yin & yang, masculine & feminine, mind & heart.

Each contains the other, as in the famous yin/yang image.

Continuous improvement is largely, though not entirely, an affair of the 'rational mind', which some people call the 'Left Brain'.

We need to know the fundamentals, including Value/Waste, 5 S, Visual Management, Standardized Work & the like.

We need enough problem solving 'reps' so that our core katas become part of our muscle memory.

Respect for People is largely, though, again, not entirely, an affair of the 'heart, which some people call the 'Limbic Brain'.

Respect for People requires empathy, and a solid grounding in core values.

Our readers will know, by now, that for me, this means the Cardinal Virtues:

• PRUDENCE,
• TEMPERANCE,
• COURAGE,
• JUSTICE

These figure strongly in my latest, Reflections of a Business Nomad.

By the way, my friend and colleague, Dr. Reldan Nadler, has written persuasively about the importance of Emotional Intelligence in leaders.

I recommend his books warmly.

Best regards,

Pascal

Point, Flow & System Improvement

By Pascal Dennis

Important that we understand the difference.

Leaders at all levels are responsible for leading improvement commensurate with their scope & span of control.

It makes little sense for a front line Team Leader to hunt the Great White Whale of System Kaizen.

Similarly, it's suboptimal for a Senior Vice-President to focus her attention on solely Point Kaizen - when she should be looking for Moby Dick.

(Caveat: she certainly needs to sponsor, motivate & check Point & Flow kaizen in her zone.)

So here are some working definitions of Point, Flow & System improvement.

Point Improvement

• improvement in a point in the value stream, e.g.
• Machine changeover,
• Material handling
• Quality - (e.g. damaged to packaging, contamination)
• Ergonomics
• Standardized work - lack of, wrong content/sequence/timing etc.

Flow Improvement

• improvement in several points in the value stream - that lead to an overall VS improvement (e.g. in Lead time, throughput, quality, inventory turns)
• Flow improvement comprises several point improvements
• A + B + C + D = overall VS improvement, where A, B, C & D might be
• Machine changeover,
• Material handling
• Quality - (e.g. damaged to packaging, contamination)
• Ergonomics
• Standardized work - lack of, wrong content/sequence/timing

System Improvement

• Entails continuing to ask Why until we uncover systemic causes to recurrent problems
• Usually entails macro systems around Man, Machine, Methods, Materials
• Can also entail core business processes - e.g. Budgeting, Forecasting, Info systems etc.

Happy fishing,

Pascal