Respect for People, Shingo Edition

  "There are four purposes of improvement: easier, better, faster, and cheaper. These four goals appear in the order of priority."

- Shigeo Shingo

The wisdom of this quote struck home recently, when I was writing my March newsletter on stretch goals. One problem with stretch goals, I believe, is that they focus on outcome metrics, and can therefore be gamed. The cost of a product or service is an incredibly important metric, but it, too, is an outcome metric, influenced by a huge variety of factors. Because of that, when a (non-lean) organization focuses on cost reduction, the most common first step is laying off people. The second most common step is downgrading the product specs, making the product both cheaper and "cheaper." Neither of these approaches are good for the worker or for the customer.

What's fascinating about this quote (to me, anyway) is that Shingo prioritizes worker health and safety above all else. First, the process must be made easier; then -- and only then -- should we worry about product quality, lead time, or cost. To be sure, making a process easier very often improves quality, speed, and cost, but that's not the focus. The focus is on the people making the product or providing the service, not the product/service itself. Putting humans at the center of kaizen is another example of respect for people. As Mark Hamel pointed out with regards to kaizen at Toyota,

Occasionally, the worker generates a great idea around quality or working process improvement. But, the primary focus for the worker is typically around the “humanization of work.“ In other words, it starts with making the work EASIER.

And this jibes with what Jim Womack wrote all the way back in 2006: that instead of focusing on waste, we should focus on unevenness (mura) and over-burden (muri).

In most companies we still see the mura of trying to “make the numbers” at the end of reporting periods. (Which are themselves completely arbitrary batches of time.) This causes sales to write too many orders toward the end of the period and production mangers to go too fast in trying to fill them, leaving undone the routine tasks necessary to sustain long-term performance. This wave of orders -- causing equipment and employees to work too hard as the finish line approaches -- creates the “overburden” of muri. This in turn leads to downtime, mistakes, and backflows – the muda of waiting, correction, and conveyance. The inevitable result is that mura creates muri that undercuts previous efforts to eliminate muda.

Of course, if we make demand more even, and if we avoid overburdening people, we're essentially making the work easier.

Lean is often referred to as a total business system. As I continue to learn more about it, I see more and deeper linkages between areas that I never realized before. This is one example: how kaizen -- properly done -- is not just a way to remove waste or make more money. It's a profound expression of respect for people.

March 2012 Newsletter -- The Folly of "Stretch Goals"

"Stretch goals" are worse than useless; they actually can demotivate workers and encourage unethical behavior. The solution is to establish a "target condition," and focus on improving the processes that will get you there. Download PDF

What's Your Job?

Michael Sliwinski of Productive Magazine just published my latest article, What's Your Job? It's adapted from the first chapter of my book, A Factory of One. Download a pdf of the whole magazine here, or get it on your iPad. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Disney's Electronic Whip

What's the purpose of visual management boards? Is it to help identify problems and improve processes? Or is it to instill fear and insecurity?

Steve Lopez at the LA Times shows how Disney hotels use visual controls for the latter pupose:

In the basements of the Disneyland and Paradise Pier hotels in Anaheim, big flat-screen monitors hang from the walls in rooms where uniformed crews do laundry. The monitors are like scoreboards, with employees' work speeds compared to one another. Workers are listed by name, so their colleagues can see who is quickest at loading pillow cases, sheets and other items into a laundry machine.

Isabel Barrera, a Disneyland Hotel laundry worker for eight years, began calling the new system the "electronic whip" when it was installed last year. The name has stuck.

Employees in the Anaheim hotels are required to key in their ID when they arrive, and from then on, their production speed is displayed for all to see. For instance, the monitor might show that S. Lopez is working at an efficiency rate of 37% of expected production. The screen displays the names of several coworkers at once, with "efficiency" numbers in green for those near or above 100% of the expected pace, and red numbers for those who aren't as fast.

Measuring productivity among hotel workers is apparently common in the hotel industry: how fast are rooms being cleaned, how quickly is laundry turned around, etc. That's not so different from the measurements that many organizations take. However, there's a huge difference when the measurements are used to identify problems in a system or process in order to aid in improvement activities, and when they're being used to "motivate" workers.

"I was nervous," said Barerra, who makes $11.94 an hour, "and felt that I was being controlled even more."

According to Barrera, the whip has led to a sort of competition among workers, some of whom have tried to race to the head of the pack. But that has led to dissension and made other employees worry that a reasonable pace won't be enough to keep the boss happy. Barrera and Beatriz Topete, an official with Unite Here Local 11, said employees have been known to skip bathroom breaks out of fear that their production will fall and managers will demand an explanation. They say they felt bad for a pregnant employee who had trouble keeping up.

In Disney's case, this system is -- predictably -- doing the polar opposite of Dr. Deming's precept to drive out fear. With no control over the system, and no ability to make improvements, workers are forced into a helpless chase after some arbitrarily defined level of productivity. It's clear that no one knows how the targets were set and what levels will "keep the boss happy." To Deming's point, if the system in which people work accounts for 90-95% of performance, simply displaying people's production speed is less than helpful. It's toxic.

I'll qualify my blog post at this point to say that I don't know anything about the journalist who wrote this piece. Is he a muckraker? Is he biased? Did he truly investigate this situation by talking to management as well as workers? I don't know. However, I can say that the presence of fear and uncertainty is a strong indicator that, from a lean perspective, there's a problem at the Magic Kingdom.

More broadly, the misuse of these visual controls is a powerful demonstration that lean isn't about tools. Used properly, Disney's flat-screen monitors could be similar to an andon, alerting management to a problem in the system, or in employee skill development, or in process design. Used as a instrument of measurement for punitive purposes -- well, all you get is an electronic whip.

What would Phil say?

My friend Eric works in his company's internal consulting group. A big part of his job is preparing Powerpoint decks and presenting them to senior management. This is how the process currently works: the Senior VP of a group -- let's call him Phil --asks for an analysis. There's no formal meeting between Phil and Eric in which they discuss the objectives and the type of analysis Phil is looking for. Phil is very busy -- too busy -- to meet with Eric for any length of time. In fact, Phil is too busy to ever meet with Eric during the project. Consequently, Eric and his team are flying blind: they don't really know what Phil wants, they don't know what kind of analysis he's looking for, and they don't know how he wants it presented.

So what happens? Everyday, Eric and his team ask, "What would Phil say about this? What would Phil say about that?" It's a giant guessing game that they always lose. Because when they do finally present to Phil, he inevitably says, "That's not really what I was looking for." And back Eric goes to re-work the analysis.

Eric says that the final two weeks before a presentation are almost all waste. His days are consumed with guessing and re-guessing the content and the precise phrasing of the text on the slides. ("Phil doesn't like it when we say 'red ink.' Phil doesn't like it when you have more than three conclusions on one slide.") And of course, the rework is enormous.

What's remarkable about this situation is that Eric's company is widely admired for its operational efficiency. Eric himself likes the company and the executive team that he occasionally works with. But even in a reasonably well-run company, you see this kind of pointless, and utterly avoidable waste.

When lean thinkers talk about going to the gemba, we often think about going to the factory floor or the nurses' station or the mortgage processing desk. But there are other gembas, too. For Phil, Eric's office is a gemba: that's where valuable business analysis is being performed. Phil should be visiting this gemba on a regular basis to see what work is being done, to find out what problems exist, and to help solve them. But he doesn't. He thinks he's too busy to do his job in that way.

This results in work coming to him in large batches (in Eric's case, 2-3 months of work). It also inevitably necessitates inspecting quality in at the end, rather than building it in from the beginning, with all the waste that entails.

As a leader, it's your responsibility to ensure that there's clarity surrounding daily work. That means going to your team's gemba on a regular basis and coaching them through their work.

Without that discipline, they'll likely be speculating about what Phil would say -- and getting it wrong.

Let's treat our employees more like machines.

My friend Elizabeth has what seems to be an enviable job. She's the head of global product development for a cool consumer products company. You can see her company's logo all over the streets of New York and the trails of Yosemite. Elizabeth is running on empty. She says that feels like she's a farmer: she gets up at 4:30am just to get on top of her work. She has 18 direct reports, and spends so much time buried in the weeds of product development meetings (moss-colored buttons or spruce-colored buttons?) that she never has the luxury of thinking -- really thinking -- about the strategic direction of the company product. She rarely has time to mentor or guide her team, either: she's gone from weekly meetings to bi-weekly, and she cancels more often than not. Oh, and the executive team has requested a 15% increase in sales for 2012 -- which means more product SKUs and more development work.

Linda Duxbury, a business school professor at Carlton University, writes often about "corporate anorexia," which is the point at which the volume of work to be done simply outstrips the capacity of the people in the system to do it.

Corporate anorexia is an apt description of Elizabeth's circumstances. I mean, really: 18 direct reports? Her company simply doesn't have the human infrastructure it should have. Its growth has been built on the backs of people like Elizabeth getting up at 4:30am -- and that's just not sustainable.

Everyone knows that machines have a fixed production capacity: you can only get a finite number of widgets per hour out of it. Everyone knows that machines need downtime for maintenance, or they'll break down. Treat your machines with respect -- don't overload them, don't forget about supporting and maintaining them, or you'll have an expensive pile of scrap metal on your hands.

Companies often talk about how "people are their greatest asset." And yet, they often treat their people worse than their machines. They overload them. They don't provide the support they need. (18 direct reports?) They expect 24/7 response to email and voice mail.

I don't know about you, but if this is the alternative, I'd rather be treated like a machine.

(Dis)Respect for People, Hospital Edition

How much do you about what's really going on at the front lines of your company? I was talking to a retired physician the other night, and he told me a story that sums up how  a lack of knowledge can lead to disrespect for people -- especially in academic medicine. Forty years ago, when he was a 32-year old junior attending physician, he researched the possibility of having his hospital become a 911 center -- which means that they'd accept public EMS ambulances, not just private ones. To his surprise, he found that the hospital was already accepting them; in fact, about 1/3 of the ambulances were public.

At a meeting, he told both the president of the hospital and his boss, the chief of surgery, that the hospital should become a formal 911 center because they were already serving that function. The meeting didn't go well:

Roger: "We're already accepting public ambulances. We should just go ahead and become a 911 center." Chief of Surgery: "No, we don't accept them. Only private ambulances come here." Roger: "Actually, that's not right. I looked into it. About 1/3 of our trauma visits are from EMS ambulances." Chief of Surgery: "And I'm telling you that we don't accept them. I'm the chief of surgery, I've been here a long time, and I know: we only take private ambulances." Roger: "But I looked into it, and that's not the case." Chief of Surgery: "I'm telling you, you're wrong." Hospital President: "Son [he's from the south], when the President of the Hospital and the Chief of Surgery tell you that we don't accept EMS ambulances, then we don't accept EMS ambulances. Is that clear? Roger: No, it's not. It's wrong. And I'll get the data to show you.

Sure enough, Roger gets the hospital logs from the previous year and finds that, in fact, about 1/3 of ambulance visits were EMS vehicles. He sends his report to the hospital president and chief of surgery with a note that says, "Isn't data wonderful?" Shortly afterwards, they applied to become a 911 center.

You can take away a lot from this story -- not least of which is how much courage Roger had in standing up to his bosses, which in medicine (like the military) is pretty difficult to do. (Roger says that data made him brave.) But for me, the big lesson is how disconnected leadership can be from the daily activities of front-line work. They may think they know what's going on, but when they get to the rarified air of the executive offices, it's far too easy to lose track of what the customer service reps, or the sales team, or the credit department deals with daily.

Going to the gemba is the antidote. You have to see for yourself what's going on where the work is being done. If you don't know, you're at serious risk of disrespecting your workers.

Februrary 2012 Newsletter: Visual Management -- Not Just for Factories

Use simple visual management tools (whiteboards!) to delegate more effectively, manage projects with less stress, and reduce the amount of pointless, stupid scrambling to find out the current status of your work. Download PDF

What's inhibiting your team?

How much damage is caused by small, irritating, daily problems like pointless meetings, ambiguous communication, and frustrating fire drills? A few months ago, my friend Matt May interviewed Teresa Amabile, author of the new book The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. According to Amabile, those little problems can be surprisingly toxic:

Of all the things that can cause people to have lousy inner work lives, the single most important is experiencing setbacks – feeling stalled or blocked in the work, or having a sense of moving backward. Amazingly, the negative effect of setbacks on emotions, perceptions and motivation can be 2-3 times greater than the positive impact of progress. This means it’s especially important for business owners and managers to reduce or eliminate forces that inhibit people’s ability to feel like they are getting somewhere on something that matters. Inhibitors can be very mundane – like a goal that isn’t sufficiently clear, or a person in the organization who hoards information – but they can be deadly.

What's really striking about Amabile's claim (and it's backed up by considerable research) is that people probably don't even notice the inhibitors, because "that's just the way it works around here." They're small and commonplace, and yet they exert a powerfully baleful influence on people's inner work lives, their creativity, and their passion for their work.

As an example, the executive team at one of my clients subscribes to a variety of market research reports. These monthly and quarterly reports are really impressive -- huge 3-ring binders that contain sales data that's been sliced and diced better than a pastrami at a kosher deli. The problem is that management hasn't defined standard metrics, so if they dig long enough, they can find anything they want in the data. Consequently, every few months there's a full-scale executive fire drill when someone on the team finds a bit of data that seems to indicate they're losing ground to a competitor. Panicked, the president will call the exec team, along with several members of marketing and sales, into the conference room for a 90 minute analysis and debate about how they should respond.

The people in marketing and sales who end up with an extra day or two of work re-analyzing the reports roll their eyes when I ask about this. They're frustrated by the lack of a consistent data dashboard to guide them, and they hate the havoc and pointless extra work it causes. As Amibile would point out, although these fire drills constitute a relatively small "inhibitor" to their ability to make progress on their work, they're soul-sucking experiences for all involved.

Sadly, the president doesn't realize this, because the data fire drills don't affect his ability to get his work done.

Take a look at the niggling annoyances in your office -- or better yet, ask people what annoyances they deal with. What pointless meetings do they have to attend? What forms are difficult to use? What goals are ambiguous? What non-value added work are they forced to do?

Amabile's theory about the importance of "small wins" ties in beautifully to the small improvements that lie at the heart of kaizen. Improvements don't have to be earth-shatteringly large to have a significant impact on the creativity, happiness, and engagement of your staff.

When you can see it, you can manage it.

My friend Paul works at a company that assesses specialty items -- Ming vases, Bugatti autos, antique crystal decanters, Pez dispenser collections, and the like -- for insurance companies. Most of their adjusters work from home. This situation creates a real problem for Paul. It's difficult to see how much work each person has in their queue, because no one is co-located. It's also difficult to see if people are falling behind in the anticipated throughput of their work. If you think about a traditional factory, it's easy to see what work is in the queue -- just look at the parts on the assembly line. It's also easy to see what work is supposed to get done that hour and that day: there's a big board at the head of the line listing hourly production targets and actuals. If there's a problem with production, it's easy to spot.

But that's not true at Paul's company. With everyone scattered around the country, and with the work existing largely in the form of electronic files, it's tough to tell what the current state is. The work is invisible. Traditional visual management tools like centrally located whiteboards won't work, because so few people are at the office. Paul tried making people's Outlook calendars public, but that didn't provide a clear picture of the status of each claim, or the workload on each person. Some of the staff complained about heavy workloads, but it was difficult to get a handle on the total volume of work, and the load on each person.

Paul designed a series of interlocking spreadsheets that showed each person's workload associated with each claim, and color-coded the backlog. Here's one of the forms:

In this screenshot, you can clearly see each person's workload. Even cooler is the "thermostat." Less than 5 days of work in the queue, and the thermostat is green. 6-10 days of work in the queue, and automatically turns yellow. Over 10 days, and it automatically turns red. As new work comes in, management can level-load the tasks by allocating them appropriately across the team of adjusters. More importantly, this visual management board acts as a signal that there may be a problem ("Why is Kate so backed up?"), and it helps identify problems in the adjustment process ("What is it about the Lee claim that makes the research take 1.7 days?") so they can engage in kaizen.

Paul is the first to admit that these spreadsheets aren't perfect. But it's a good first step towards understanding the current state and identifying process areas for improvement. Prior to this, the only thing Paul knew for sure was that Kate complained she was overworked -- which wasn't very helpful. And they only addressed the overall status of their backlog at weekly meetings.

The challenge -- and the benefits -- for you are clear. Making your team's work visible enables you to improve it. It may be difficult due to the nature of the work and the physical location of the team, but it's seldom impossible.

Remember: when you can see it, you can manage it.

Librarian vs. Archaeologist

Michael Schrage writes at the HBR blog that getting organized is mostly a waste of time:

When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.

IBM researchers observed that email users who "searched" rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.

Six years ago, I would have disagreed with Schrage: I recommended that people embrace their inner Linnaeus and set up elaborate folder structures for their electronic files and their email. The goal was a comprehensive taxonomy that would allow people to locate any message in seconds. But when Google desktop can find anything within .03 seconds, why bother taking the time to do all of this organizing? Yes, you'll have to cull through some irrelevant results, but the time you spend sorting the informational wheat from the chaff is far less than the time you'd spend painstakingly cataloging and filing each individual message and file. (And that's assuming that you don't mistakenly put the Henderson invoice in the Hernandez folder; then it's gone forever.)

As Schrage points out, this approach is actually very much in keeping with lean thinking, insofar as we're moving from a "push" approach to information management -- organize now, whether or not you need it -- to a "pull" approach -- organize and sort your information when you need to find it.

What Schrage doesn't address is the reality that not all of our information is electronic and suitable for search. There's no Google search for carpet swatches and spec sheets, Etruscan pottery fragments, or pathology samples. There's also no random search for plenty of publications that aren't digitized. For these things, there really is value to "getting organized."

Even when information is electronic, sometimes it's easier to organize it than to search for it. My wife, for example, handles the scheduling for the 13 interventional radiologists in her section. Each month she sends an email to her colleagues asking them if they have any vacation requests, conference commitments, or other scheduling issues she needs to account for. She'll get responses like this:

"I'll be at the ASCO conference from Jan 22-26." "I'm taking my kids skiing from Jan 20-24." "I'm visiting Dana Farber Cancer Center Jan 18-19." "I'm taking a couple days off from Jan 25-28."

With no keywords, there's no way to search her mail for these messages. And the messages can't even be threaded, because people don't always respond to her original email. As a result, she keeps distinct mail folders to handle scheduling requests as they come in.

I think the organized vs. disorganized dichotomy is a false one. Your information takes many forms, and requires different treatment. Sometimes it's better to be a librarian , and sometimes it's better to be an archaeologist. The method you take depends on the problem you're trying to solve. That's real lean thinking.

January 2012 Newsletter: Execution & Honesty

Failure to deliver on your promises doesn't just lower your approval ratings. It seriously affects perceptions of your honesty. Download PDF

Rethinking Performance Reviews for 2012

The first chapter of my new book, A Factory of One, addresses the need to define value in your work. This is a critical first step because, in my experience, organizations often spend time, effort, and energy improving a process that creates no value -- and therefore shouldn't be done in the first place. (Incidentally, you can download a pdf of this chapter for free here.) The flood of performance reviews that come at the end of the year reminded me of how important this step is. A recent SmartBrief on Leadership survey demonstrates just how valueless performance reviews really are:

Incredible: 58% of the responders say that the reviews are pretty much worthless -- and you can bet that a significant proportion of the other 38% has no value either. As the Wall Street Journal reported,

One academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies found that two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given.

Samuel Culbert, professor of management at UCLA, is probably the leading voice in attacking the pointlessness, ineffectiveness, and immorality of traditional performance reviews; in his view, the performance review should be replaced by the performance preview -- which, from a lean perspective, makes total sense: after all, the PDCA cycle begins with planning, which is what the performance preview is all about.

In light of these results, you have to wonder why companies have reviews in the first place -- and why they'd want to have even more of them. Fifty-one percent of companies conduct formal performance reviews once per year, but now 41% of firms do semi-annual reviews. As Culbert tartly asks, "Why is doing something stupid more often better than doing something stupid once a year?" Or in my language, why improve a process that has no value at all?

I think that a better approach for 2012 is to ditch the performance review and move towards employee performance PDCA:

1. Grasp the Situation: Identify the goal for the week or month 2. Plan: Make a plan for how to accomplish that goal 3. Do: Follow the plan 4. Check: Determine whether or not the plan has been achieved, and why (or why not) 5. Adjust: Make changes as needed to help the employee reach the next goal

This approach may sound mechanistic, but if you think about it, it gives you a fighting chance at achieving that things you really want: better communication. Closer cooperation. More salient feedback and mentoring. Improved performance. Attainment of key goals.

If this sounds like it's too much work, or you don't think it will fly in your organization, fine. Just stop wasting your time -- and more importantly, your employees' time -- on the traditional performance review. Your employees will thank you.

Small, Rapidly Growing Non-Profit Organization

Situation: A NYC-based non-profit organization was growing rapidly—from 5 employees to 56 in less than one year. However, the extra staff didn’t alleviate the burden on the executive team, and in fact, decisions took longer than ever. Intervention: We realized that the new staff were unable to shoulder the operational and managerial load of daily work because there was a fundamental mismatch between their responsibility and their authority: although they were given responsibility for certain areas of operation, they didn’t have the power to make decisions. As a result, all decisions funneled up to the executive team, creating massive bottlenecks. We identified the common decisions that needed to be made in each role and defined financial parameters within which each person could make decisions without approval.

Resolution: The executive team was freed from weighing in on all decisions, staff morale increased significantly (according to internal surveys), and major initiatives in the following year were all launched on time.

Case Study -- Biomedical Device Manufacturer

Situation: Senior members of the operations group at a major biomedical device manufacturer didn’t have time to focus on their critical work, largely because they were spending too much time in non-essential meetings.

Intervention: We conducted an “A3” analysis to fully grasp the current conditions, quantify the costs to the company, identify root causes, and develop countermeasures. The analysis revealed that they were spending approximately nine hours per person per week in meetings with no real purpose, and more damagingly, that meetings were set according to a schedule, rather than in response to real customer need. We set up a file on the shared server for information updates, initiated a system of ad hoc 1:1 meetings to address most issues, and reserved group meetings for more complex problems.

Resolution: Meeting commitments were reduced by one-third – 56.5 hours per month – and senior staff had additional time to drive projects to completion.

Case Study -- Sporting Goods Manufacturer

Situation: The warranty department at a mid-sized sporting goods company was overwhelmed with product complaints. Sales had tripled over the previous four years, and the company instituted a 100% guarantee on all products, increasing the burden on the small warranty department. Turnaround time on consumer calls and emails averaged from 3-4 weeks. Consumers were frustrated, and the company was getting torched on Facebook, significantly affecting brand loyalty. Intervention: We drew a value stream map to clarify the situation and identify the root cause of the problem. In this case, the incomplete information that consumers were providing from the outset forced the warranty service reps into several rounds of email exchanges and phone calls in order to get the necessary information—essentially tripling their work. We redesigned the warranty pages of the web site and built forms that prompted consumers to provide the right information the first time. We also channeled international and military consumers into different buckets, so that they could be handled appropriately.

Resolution: Turnaround time for warranty issues was reduced from four weeks to 48 hours. (As a side project, we also reduced on-hand inventory by 80% by switching to a kanban system with frequent replenishments.)

A Factory of One is Finally Available!

I'm pleased -- giddy, thrilled, quivering -- to announce that my first book, A Factory of One, is now in stock and available to ship from Amazon. The book explores in detail a theme that I've been writing about in this blog for the past couple of years: how to apply lean concepts and tools to individual work in order to improve performance, reduce waste, and deliver more customer value. In my view, we too often focus on the entire value stream or a large process within that value stream, and ignore the way people work within that value stream.

Many bloggers and lean thinkers within this community have provided support and guidance for me during the writing of the book, and have rallied around me for the book launch as well. My thanks to all of you.

Read Matt May's recent review here, and his article on 5S and K.I.S.S. here. And, of course, you can read much more about the book and download a free chapter on the book's website, www.afactoryofone.com.

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival: Annual Roundup 2011

I'm very proud to say that John Hunter kindly gave me the reins (for one day, at least) for the 2011 Management Improvement Blog Carnival Annual Roundup. What I’ve tried to do this year is select posts that gave me a new perspective about the world around me, and how improvements could be made to the current state.

First up: Shmula, the blog of Pete Abila.

Zipcar Customer Experience: Variability, Utilization, and Queueing is about as dry a blog post title as you could imagine. But what a fantastic analysis of the Zipcar system! Pete lucidly explores some of the major challenges stemming from variability and utilization facing an operation like Zipcar, and addresses the three kinds of buffers that the company needs to make it work. I’m not a process engineer, but even for me, this was one of the coolest posts of the year.

Death by a Thousand Cuts highlights how organizations begin their journey toward failure through many small decisions made over a long period of time—which is, incidentally, also how culture is created.

Pete provides a nice report on a presentation by Mark Zuckerberg in Mark Zuckerberg: I’d Rather Them Believe the Company Was Broken. If you only know of Zuckerberg from the movie, The Social Network, this is a refreshingly different view. He comes across as a modest guy who’s fully aware that his team deserves the credit for making the company successful.

Finally, check out Leader Standard Work. This concept is garnering more visibility of late. Pete provides a concrete description and approach to implementing it yourself. You’ll inevitably customize it to your specific needs, but this is a great place to start.

Next up: Daily Kaizen, the blog of the improvement folks at Group Health Cooperative.

Consultant Space Kaizen: Practicing What We Teach is a beautiful—and detailed—example of eating one’s dog food. The team describes how they applied all the tools they teach to their own workspace in order to reduce their resource consumption and model the process for the future.

Connecting to the “Why” is an excellent reminder that improvement for its own sake is pointless, uninspiring, and doomed to failure. Successful, sustainable change must be linked to the “why.” If you don’t know the ultimate purpose, then your improvement is a house built on sand.

Learning to Offer Questions, Not Solutions reminds us that change management and improvement is best led by questions, not solutions—and that those questions need to engage both the head and the heart.

The “D” Word tackles the under-appreciated trait of discipline, and explores how it’s “the fuel that drives the lean engine.”

Finally, Peter Drucker’s Management Philosophy blog. Sadly, it’s not written by Drucker himself. But the author, Jorrian Gelink, does a wonderful job of channeling Drucker’s insights, connecting them to current events, and reminding us how relevant his ideas are to both lean and management excellence.

In a business world increasingly engorged with email, text messages, and IMs, Effective Communication—The Speed, Quality and Cost Triangle, higlights the very significant tradeoff between ease and quality in our communications. Read this before you send your next email.

Keeping the focus on communication, Effective Communication – Execution and Results in an Organization provides three key points to remember when communicating within an organization. Attending to these points is a good way to reduce waste and improve the quality of your communication.

How do you build trust as a leader? The Three Cores to Building Leadership Trust eloquently explains that trust relies upon execution, people development, and honesty. The are simple, but incredibly powerful truths that are too often forgotten in the drive to get through one’s email.

If you liked this curated list of links, check out the other 2011 Annual Review posts here, and the regular Management Improvement Carnival here.

The C-Suite Double Standard

When I was at the AME Conference in Dallas a couple of months ago, I started noticing what I call the C-suite double standard: leaders and executives who are ferocious about improving manufacturing processes and eliminating waste, but who passively accept waste in their office operations and individual work. Do any of these hit home?

On the shop floor: Looking for a tool is waste. In the C-suite: looking for information is part of work. We’d never accept a skilled machinist spending time looking for tools. That’s classic waste, and we’d embark on a 5S program to ensure that the worker has the tools he needs, when he needs them, in order to do his job. In the C-suite though? Who hasn’t spent 2, 3, 5 minutes—or more— looking for important information in piles of paper or long email strings? If we’re so passionate about making sure that the machinist can deploy his skills without wasting time, why aren’t we equally passionate about making sure that the VP of Marketing can do the same?

On the shop floor: Do everything possible to ensure that people can work without interruption. In the C-suite: Interruptions are so commonplace that they’re hardly even recognized. A friend of mine tells me that Toyota has andon cords hanging everywhere so that workers can get help when there’s a problem, but the company does everything possible to protect the workers from interruptions. He says it’s remarkable how hard the company works to shield them from anything that would break their focus. But between open door policies and a lack of forethought, people in the office suffer an interruption every 11 minutes, with serious consequences for the quality and efficiency of their work.

On the shop floor: Standard work is the foundation for improvement. In the C-suite: Standard what? Production workers continually create and refine their standard work processes to improve quality and safety, reduce variation, and lay the foundation for improvement. C-suite workers run from fire to fire, have no cadence or structure to their day/week, and allow themselves to be driven by external forces—often at the expense of getting to the gemba, helping people develop problem solving skills, and focusing on strategic issues.

On the shop floor: Everyone is on the lookout for the waste of waiting. In the C-suite: On-time meetings are a joke. If materials, parts, and supplies aren’t delivered on time and workers are forced to wait, the team is expected to do a 5 Why (or A3) analysis to understand and eliminate the problem. Everyone understands the waste of waiting, and uses that problem as an opportunity to improve. Now, consider meetings in the C-suite. People wait all the time for the whole group to arrive and meetings to start. This colossal waste of time and resources is viewed as natural and inevitable as a John Boehner crying, or the Cubs missing the playoffs. Even worse: executives actively create this condition by scheduling meetings back-to-back without a break to travel between rooms/floors/buildings—and unless they’ve unlocked the secret to teleportation, that’s a recipe for having people sitting around a conference table playing Angry Birds on their phones.

On the shop floor: Machines and production lines have a finite capacity. Avoid over-burdening. In the C-suite: "I need this tomorrow morning!" People accept that machines have finite production capacity. You can’t get 100 parts an hour out of a machine that can only make 70 parts per hour. Even trying to operate an assembly line at 100% capacity guarantees a longer cycle time, due to the problems that inevitably occur. But in the C-suite, there’s no hesitation to overload people: ridiculous deadlines (“I need this in an hour!”) due to lousy planning and scheduling are rife. Sometimes there are emergencies, of course, but asking people to operate this way is a recipe for slower response in the long run.

On the shop floor: Improving our processes is essential to our long-term success. In the C-suite: This is the way it's always been done. Annual performance reviews. Enough said.

December 2011 Newsletter: The Waste of @Waiting For

If you're a fan of GTD and you use an "@waiting for" folder, you're wasting time, effort, and energy. There's a better way. Download PDF