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Publisher’s Note: Lean Leadership and Culture Change
The success of companies that choose to undergo a lean transformation
is catalyzed by passionate leadership and the resulting culture change
that serves as the backbone of the journey. A lean leader creates the
requisite excitement for a profitable growth across the entire
enterprise enabling the proper transformation to take place.
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Case Study: Vermeer Market Based StrategyQuadTech
Vermeer’s culture has always been one of innovation, but for its first forty years, the process was very informal. As markets evolved, the company became a high market share manufacturer competing in mature, relatively low-margin industries. After weathering a significant downturn in the early 2000s, Vermeer to develop new strategies to help the company both grow and diversify its product offering. The new strategies helped Vermeer identify the sweet spot between operational effectiveness and strategic positioning (being better and being different). This approach has transformed the way Vermeer innovates today..
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Accelerated Learning: What is a Learning Organization?
Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline identifies five
disciplines that are key to building a learning organization—shared
vision, personal mastery, team learning, mental models, and systems
thinking. A kaizen week is a microcosm of a learning organization
because it involves all five disciplines. By continuing these practices
beyond a kaizen event and applying them to all aspects of your
business, you’ll have taken the first steps to becoming a learning
organization.
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Radical Strategic Visioning: Combatting Anti-Synergy
Too often organizations will procrastinate about dealing with a bad
situation. But delaying action allows anti-synergy to take hold, and
before you know it, what was potentially a small problem (i.e., one
person) will soon become a much larger one. If you consistently address
issues early on, before anti-synergy can rear its head, you will enable
your company to maintain a culture that’s consistent with a lean
organization.
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Books to Read and Recommend: Blue Ocean Strategy
If you want a greater understanding of what it means to be a value
innovator and how to move your lean journey to the next step to run a
different race, add Blue Ocean Strategy (W. Chan Kim and Renée
Mauborgne, Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, Boston, MA,
2005) to your library. It’s a book for lean practitioners and value
innovators to live by.
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Futures: The Art of Consistency
Management style reflects who you are as an individual, and it’s
important that your preferred style melds well with your work teams.
You must know and master yourself first and then decide if your
organization’s and co-workers’ values, styles, and personality are a
reasonable fit. If so, then you’ll likely be able to help the business
and its people grow and move forward as a learning organization on its
lean journey.
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Lean Champions: Barb King
Co-founder and president of Landscape Structures, passed away in
March 2008. Barb was a true lean leader with very high work ethics and
deep concern and care for the customers and the associates at Landscape
Structures and the community at large. Her leadership and passion will
be deeply missed by the lean community at large.
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Tech Talk: Progressive 5S – We’re Not Talking Trash
With so much emphasis these days on becoming “lean” in the workplace,
it is hard to believe that most people still refer to 5S as simply
housekeeping. More properly defined, 5S is a process for creating and
maintaining a safe, organized, clean, high-performance workplace. The
essence of Progressive 5S is the ability to pair each step of the
process with a specific task or activity along with a key discipline or
behavior that would need to be performed for that step. By focusing in
on one level at a time, it becomes significantly easier to both
implement and monitor results.
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Think Sync: Leveraging Lean to Eliminate Seasonal Inventory Surges
One consumer household and consumer care product company leveraged
lean to eliminate seasonal inventory surges by using demand analysis
and inventory reduction to free up more than $1 million in working
capital.
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Field Notes: Two Stories
At Milbank, a dual-pronged approach was taken to ensuring the
usefulness of point kaizens in sustaining MDI results. First, standard
work was created for choosing point kaizens and then an incentive
program was created to encourage completion of point kaizens and
recognition of good results. Fosfertil, Brazil’s largest supplier of
raw material for fertilizers, implemented LeanSigma over 12 weeks at
its seven manufacturing units. Among the results achieved were
productivity improvement of 50 percent for the industrial areas and a
dramatic reduction of water and steam consumption at some production
units.
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