Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival: Annual Roundup 2013, Part 2

John Hunter, the maestro of the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog and the year-end Management Improvement Carnival has once again allowed me to contribute a list of some of my favorite blogs and posts from 2013. I never miss reading these three blogs—they consistently educate, enlighten, and entertain me. Earlier, I reviewed Michel Baudin's epnonymous blog. Today, I've selected Mark Rosenthal's Lean Thinker blog.

Mark Rosenthal’s occasional posts come straight from the shop floor. When you read his blog, you feel like you’ve been transported right to the action in the production line. That’s where he spends his time, and that’s the spawning ground for his ideas and reflections.

He describes the absurdity of the 20-page “lean audit” another consulting company uses to gauge a company’s progress, and advocates a far simpler approach (which comes straight from the standup meeting): what are you trying to achieve; where are you now; and what’s getting in the way. His story of how a team finally understood the purpose of 5S and how it affects workflow should be read by every consultant that’s ever mindlessly pushed a client to start with 5S because “that’s what you do.” Lest you think that Mark only knows about machine set ups, check out his article on leadership that connects a leader’s journey with Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey. And lastly, if you’ve ever struggled to convince people of the value of checklists, read his post on a different way to view them: “Do vs. “Did You Do?” It's a subtle difference, but extremely powerful nonetheless, and might go a long way towards increasing acceptance and usage of checklists where you work.

Mark's writing -- both in style and in content -- reveals both his humanity and his deep understanding of respect for people.

Check out the other year-end blog reviews on the Curious Cat website here. Or browse the entire blog review category here.

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival: Annual Roundup 2013, Part 1

John Hunter, the maestro of the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog and the year-end Management Improvement Carnival has once again allowed me to contribute a list of some of my favorite blogs and posts from 2013. I never miss reading these three blogs—they consistently educate, enlighten, and entertain me.

I'm breaking the list into three separate posts to increase the chance that you'll take the time to check out these posts. For the first installment, I've selected Michel Baudin’s blog. 

Michel Baudin’s posts fall into two general categories: the first is an in-depth discussion of some topic that he finds interesting—and given that he seems to have read a library’s worth of dust-covered tomes related to manufacturing, production, and industrialization, he has a lot of topics to cover. Did you know anything about orbit charts—when to use them, where they came from, and how to make them? Neither did I, until I read Baudin’s post on this topic. His exegesis on the purpose of standard work is a masterful explanation of why it’s essential to manufacturing excellence, while this post explains how it can foster improvement in a non-manufacturing environment as well. And if you want to know anything about poka-yoke, you don’t need to go any farther than this column.

The second type of post you’ll find on Michel Baudin’s site is a commentary on a news story or blog post—he calls this “Michel Baudin’s insight.” From almost anyone else, defining one’s own comments as “insight” would be insufferably arrogant. Michel pulls it off, however, due to the extraordinary depth and breadth of his knowledge and to his serious analytical acumen. Take a look, for example, at his compelling argument that mistake proofing must not add any labor to the operation, lest the people working in the operation work around it. Or the way he skewers the oft-cited maxim that “only the last quarter turn of the nut adds value.” Or his keen eye in spotting space design mistakes in the background photo of a newspaper article about lean in a hospital. Refreshingly, Baudin isn’t just a gear head. His understanding of lean goes far beyond the factory floor and the simple ROI metrics that other, less knowledgeable writers focus on. Notice how he takes to task the BCG consultants who wrote an article on lean that “only speaks the language of money,” neglecting the fact that not all improvements have a direct financial impact.

Read Michel's blog. The extraordinary breadth and depth of his knowledge guarantees that you'll learn something every time.

Check out the other year-end blog reviews on the Curious Cat website here. Or browse the entire blog review category here.

More bullshit business blather.

Another day, another boneheaded analysis by a supposed expert business journalist. This time it's Eric Chemi, journalist at Bloomberg Businessweek, who recent argues that it's beneficial for companies to be hated by customers. He makes a really good point. Except, of course, for the logical fallacies that permeate the piece and undermine his argument. For starters, Chemi cites monopolistic or oligopolistic companies as evidence that hated companies do well:

For all the usual complaints—such as “I hate dealing with this company” or “These guys are the worst at customer service”—about the usual suspects from the ranks of cable and Internet providers, airlines, and banks, it turns out they just don’t have much incentive to care. The companies you hate are making plenty of money. In fact, the scorned tend to perform better than the companies you like.

His poster child for business success is Time Warner Cable, which has seen its stock price increase 450% over the past five years. That's pretty impressive. . . until you compare it to the overall Dow Jones Industrial Average, which (depending on precisely when you measure it) is up about 825% during the same period. Although I'm not an expert on telecommunications, I do know that TWC has a near-monopoly on the New York City market for cable and internet, which is probably behind the stock increase -- not its legendarily bad customer service. How would these hated firms fare in a more competitive environment? Probably not nearly as well.

Chemi goes on to point out that statistically there's actually no correlation between customer satisfaction scores and stock market returns, and therefore there's no point in trying to improve those scores.

Your contempt really, truly doesn’t matter to these companies, with no influence on the bottom line. If anything, it might hurt company profits to spend money making customers happy. For cable-TV providers, an industry whose customers famously have few options, happy users could be a waste of money and bad for shareholders.

Fair enough. Except that stock price isn't the same as a company's "bottom line" by a long shot. Just take a look at the 35% decline in Apple's stock price in just a few months last year, even though its bottom line remained quite attractive. More importantly, it's ludicrous to assume that stock price is an indicator of long-term business quality or success. You don't have to look very far across the business landscape to find the carcasses of high-stock price firms that found out the hard way that their businesses were not, in fact, sustainable.

If you take a look at industries where competition really is cutthroat, what you find is that customer satisfaction really does matter to long-term success. Maybe not to today's stock price, but definitely to long-term viability. See Toyota, Proctor & Gamble, Wal-Mart, FedEx, or Southwest for evidence of that correlation. If lean teaches us one thing, it's that relentless focus on improving customer value is what separates the great firms from, well, business journalists like Eric Chemi.

Book Review: Creating a Kaizen Culture

I just finished reading Creating a Kaizen Culture, by Jon Miller, Mike Wroblewski, and Jaime Villafuerte. It's terrific, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to deepen their understanding of lean and the term that we so easily bandy about without thought: "kaizen." The real value of this book, I think, is the emphasis on, and elaboration of, the "respect for people" element of lean. From all my readings and experiences, I've thought of respect for people in two primary ways: first and most obviously, seeing people as assets, not just variable costs to be fired when finances are tight. Second, avoiding what John Shook once called "laissez faire" management, in which you take a hands-off approach to management in order to avoid impinging upon workers' freedom.

This book argues convincingly that kaizen is so much more than the common five-day blitz to improve a specific process. Kaizen -- real, lasting kaizen -- is about human development. It's about creating people who are better problem solvers, better thinkers, and more fully actualized human beings. To be sure, a company pursuing a kaizen culture will benefit financially, but that's just an ancillary (if welcome) benefit. Kaizen is a moral imperative for any organization -- and prerequisite for a lean organization.

The book offers plenty of theory related to culture change, relying upon both lean luminaries and the usual array of business thinkers (John Kotter, Edgar Schein, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Jeff Liker, Masaaki Imai, et al). The case studies are wide-ranging and persuasive -- they beautifully illustrate the point that creating a sustainable kaizen culture is about simple practices, done repeatedly, with conviction.

If we are indeed finally leaving what Jim Womack called the "tool age" of lean, you can do no better than to read this book.

December 2013 Newsletter -- Is Your Brand Strong Enough to Survive This?

If the future of retail is indeed “omni-channel,” I think these photos speak volumes. Consumers want to be able to shop for the brands and products that they want, when they want it, and where they happen to be at that moment. Which makes ordinary retailers less important than the products that they carry. . . . Download PDF to read the full article

Hiding from Managers is not the sign of a Kaizen Culture.

Harvard Business School professors are at it again. Last week, I was incredulous about their research suggesting that maintaining "strategic inefficiencies" in a hospital is a savvy way to discourage physicians from ordering unnecessary tests. This week I'm gobsmacked by their research suggesting that decreasing observation of workers increases productivity. I'm sure that Bill Waddell will soon be fulminating about Harvard's ivory tower view more convincingly than I will. But in the meantime, check out what Professor Ethan Bernstein calls the Transparency Paradox: that watching your employees less closely at work might yield more transparency throughout the organization. In his studies at a global contract manufacturer's plant in Southern China, his team of researchers

were quietly shown 'better ways' of accomplishing tasks by their peers-a 'ton of little tricks' that 'kept production going' or enabled 'faster, easier, and/or safer production,'" he writes. "Then they were told 'whenever the [customers/managers/leaders] come around, don't do that, because they'll get mad.'"

The official company practices happened to be less effective than the tribal tricks of the trade—tricks that the employees hid from the higher-ups, thus thwarting the goal of learning by observing. Bernstein says that there was no ill-intent or cheating behind such hiding behavior, but merely a rational calculation about human behavior: Operators were hiding their freshest, most innovative techniques from management so as not to "bear the cost of explaining better ways of doing things to others."

In the paper he recalls a worker telling [a research team member], "Even if we had the time to explain, and they had the time to listen, it wouldn't be as efficient as just solving the problem now and then discussing it later. Because there is so much variation, we need to fix first, explain later."

To be fair to Professor Bernstein, he points out that the workers did share ideas with their supervisors after testing and perfecting them:

"There was a pride in ownership leading to the desire to share," Bernstein says. "And so they did. But only after they had data to support their new approach."

But what's troubling about this study is the assumption that there's an innate and immutable human tendency inside any organization to hide work so as "not to bear the cost of explaining better ways of doing things." Now I don't know anything about the organizational culture in this global contract manufacturer in China, but I do know that Toyota, Autoliv, Wiremold, Lantech, and hundreds of other companies have demonstrated that you can create a culture that prizes, rewards, and elevates the habit of sharing information and improving processes through constant application of the PDSA cycle.

Professor Bernstein goes on to explain that

On the manufacturing floor, the workers were trying to manage the attention of the managers. They knew that if they did something that looked weird, it would draw attention and, quite frankly, would disrupt their current work process. If they didn't look weird, then that wouldn't happen. And they knew that just for the sake of getting the production numbers, sometimes it would be good to attract attention and sometimes it wouldn't.

Professor Bernstein's research was particularly irritating to me because I'm in the middle of reading Jon Miller's excellent book, Creating a Kaizen Culture. Jon argues convincingly that the highest performing organizations avoid the implicit assumption that managers and employees are on different teams (at best) and antagonistic (at worst).

A culture that has as its raison d'etre human improvement  doesn't need to shield workers from managers. When supervisors' and managers' primary function is the nurturing and development of front-line employees, there's no need to hide "for the sake of getting the production numbers."

Focus on value, not deliverables.

If you missed it, check out the recent HBR article, "Six Drucker Questions That Simplify a Complex Age." Here they are:

1. What does the customer value?
2. What is our business, and what should it be?
3. What is the task?
4. What are your ideas for us to try to do new things, develop new products, design new ways of reaching the market?
5. Who in this organization depends on me for what information?
6. What would happen if this were not done at all?

The author suggests asking the first two from the standpoint of your overall organization, asking those who work for you the second two, and asking yourself the final two.

It's more than a little presumptuous of me to use Drucker to reference one of my blog posts or my book, but these six questions force you to do precisely what I've advocated before: focus on value, not on deliverables.

All too often our personal expectations or our organizational metrics push us in the opposite direction. How many hours did the person work today? What does the latest PowerPoint presentation look like? How many calls did the customer service rep handle last hour? None of these measurements capture the value that the person creates in the eyes of the (internal or external) customer, because they're concerned with a measurable deliverable.

First, think about value.

Maintaining inefficiency is a good thing? Seriously?

Leave it to the professors at Harvard Business School to demonstrate a complete lack of lean thinking. A recent HBS Working Paper points out that increasing ordering capacity of the ultrasound service in a hospital led to longer wait times for that service. It turns out that the increased capacity led physicians to order more ultrasounds.

This type of finding isn’t new – transportation experts have known for a long time that building more road capacity doesn’t ease traffic congestion. The extra road room encourages more people to drive, with the result that the new, wider roads have just as much gridlock as before.

What’s so utterly disappointing, however, is the authors’ recommendation: retain the inefficient step in the process in order to discourage physicians from ordering ultrasounds. They write:

to improve hospital performance it could be optimal to put into place "inefficiencies" to become more efficient.

The authors have correctly recognized that given the opportunity, doctors will order more tests. But their solution of keeping inefficiencies in the system is as absurd as saying that we should make cars less stable in order to keep people driving within the speed limit. Or that we should have smaller freezers so that we can’t keep as much ice cream in the house and get fat.

The right recommendation – the lean recommendation – would maintain the local level efficiency improvement, while also including a structured problem solving initiative to reduce the number of unneeded ultrasounds. As Dr. Deming pointed out, the system in which people work drives the vast majority of their behaviors. The doctors aren’t simply ordering more ultrasounds because they can, irrespective of the benefit to the patient. They’re doing so because the system rewards that behavior.

You’d think that a Harvard Business School professor would know that.

Going to the (food truck) gemba

Roy Choi, the inventor of the Korean Taco and one of the fathers of the food truck craze, was interviewed on Fresh Air last week. He's a restaurateur, a cook, an author, and clearly a man who understands the power of "going and seeing." The interviewer, Terry Gross, asks Choi how much time he spends in food trucks -- between his book tour and the challenges of running four restaurants in addition to the food trucks, he's a pretty busy guy.

GROSS: So, how much time do you actually spend in trucks?

CHOI: I'm there every day.

GROSS: Oh, really? I just assumed that you had other people doing that.

CHOI: No, I have a crew, you know, that cooks, just like a chef has cooks in the kitchen. But the trucks are my kitchen, and so that's where I am. You know, if I'm not doing something crazy like this [interviews] or doing a book tour, I'm with my trucks, on the streets with the people. I don't know where else I would be. It's my life.

GROSS: But you have several restaurants now, too.

CHOI: Yeah. Every day, I wake up. My only goal every day when I wake up is to try to see every single person within my organizations and shake their hand and give them a hug and then check the food, and then go back through at night. . . . I have four places, four restaurants. So I'll hit all the restaurants during the day, check on prep, say hello to everybody, hit one lunch truck, hit the trucks in the morning, as well, to check on prep, and then do some office work. And then I go back out and check on the trucks again, and then I go back out to the restaurants and then enjoy the crowd and enjoy the people and see them eating. I really get a lot of energy and my information from how people are eating the food. So that's where I am.

Sometimes when the lean community talks about "going and seeing" (particularly as part of leader standard work), it comes across as a perfunctory, mechanical, activity. I think Choi's comments really get to the heart of what "go and see" is all about.

It's about showing concern for your employees -- even if you don't actually give them a hug. It's about respect for people and by seeing how they're working and making corrections or providing help, if necessary. It's about getting close to the customer, and learning by observation when you see how they interact with your product or service.

I don't know about you, but I call that leadership.

You can read the entire transcript or listen to the interview here.

November 2013 Newsletter - Information is Better in Small Batches

Toyota has taught us that we get better quality and lower costs by building products in small lot sizes equal to demand (ideally, one piece flow). But it’s not just physical material that should be managed in one-piece flow. We benefit by managing information in small lot sizes as well. So say goodbye to the weekly/monthly status update meetings. . . . Download PDF to read the full article

How to make money from changeovers

Spangler Candy, the maker of Dum Dum lollipops, produces 10 million candies per day. The company keeps 16 flavors in the market at any given time, and each production line runs multiple flavors. Switching the production line from, say, Watermelon to Root Beer, means stopping the line, washing the machines, cleaning the hoses, and then running a small batch of the new flavor to prime the line for the next flavor. That's expensive.

I don't know if Spangler has any sort of lean program, and I don't know whether or not they've reduced changeover time as much as possible. But I do know that they've found a way to turn a mechanical necessity into an asset.

Enter the Mystery Flavor.

Beginning in 2001, the Spangler Company decided to just skip the cleaning. According to Mental Floss, “the Mystery Flavor pop is a mixture of two flavors that come together when the end of one batch of candy meets the beginning of the next batch. [. . .] The candy lines keep running continuously, and the Mystery Flavor pops are a surprise treat every time.”

Okay, this may not be the pinnacle of lean -- figuring out a way to eliminate the machine cleaning might be more of a lean ideal -- but in the meantime, the company has found a way to turn manufacturing limitations into value for customers.

Itchy fingers.

Bison Gear & Engineering, a designer and manufacturer of custom motors, reduced their new product development lead time from several weeks to three days by implementing lean concepts. One of their techniques is the "project blitz." They put a team of engineers together (literally -- they move their desks right next to each other), protect them from interruptions (they stretch police riot tape across the engineers' area so that no one can enter), and work exclusively on a single project until it's completed. Work flows from one engineer to another with no waiting and no distractions. They've realized, as I've written about before, that task switching is toxic to productivity.

Interestingly, Bison goes further than just protecting the team from external interruptions. The engineers also avoid self-generated distractions. Even when one of the team isn't actively working on the project at a given moment, she won't check email or surf the web while waiting for her next task. Experience has taught them that recovering from that type of distraction and getting back into the project flow slows down the blitz -- even though she's just waiting. Instead, she stays attentive to the work that the others are doing, remains more involved in the process, and is able to jump back in and contribute more quickly.

I asked their VP of Engineering about this prohibition on email. He said the emotional cost of this self-imposed disconnect was surprisingly high. People have an ingrained feeling that if they're not working, they're wasting time. Sitting idly at their desks and not -- at the very least -- clearing out their inboxes, felt profoundly unproductive. Even when it was clear that the project progressed faster when they worked this way, they still had itchy fingers.

To me, this is a beautiful example on a small scale of "going slow to go fast." If you can ignore the itchy fingers and the need to be busy every second of the day, you might find that your projects move faster, too.

Visual management is in the details

Creative visual management can be found in any environment -- and it doesn't cost anything. At the end of dinner last night, the waitress brought the check and carefully aligned it with the edge of the table. She said, "When you're ready to pay, just turn the check sideways [so that it's perpendicular to the table edge] and I'll know to pick it up.

My dinner companion and I could continue talking without the waitress hovering over us, and she could spend more time attending to other customers.

Simple. Elegant. The best visual management (and the best tools, in general) always are.

Architectural poka-yoke.

There are two buildings on the Pixar campus. Each one has only four bathrooms (two men’s, two women’s). All in the same place – the main hall of the building. No matter where you sit, if you want to pee, you have to get up from your desk, schlep down a long corridor to the staircase, down the stairs, and across the main hall to the bathroom. This layout is not an example of lousy architecture. This is by design. Steve Jobs's design.

Jobs recognized that functional silos are an unavoidable feature of large, complex organizations. He also recognized the danger in those silos—the lack of communication, the lack of cohesion, the development of an “us” and “them” mentality. The design of the buildings was one of his attempts to foster interaction and communication between departments. If you force everyone to come to the same place to go to the bathroom, they’ll see each other and talk with each other on a regular basis.

The Wall Street Journal’s recent article on the effects of moving people into different seats is testament to Jobs’ instincts. You can’t force people to think horizontally in terms of a value stream, but you can certainly help to blunt the silo mentality by forcing people to meet other people upstream and downstream. It's kind of like architectural poka-yoke -- error proofing through building design.

If your organization is growing, think about how the office is laid out and where people are physically sitting. Think about the silos that will be inevitably be created by location. What can you do to increase the level of interaction among departments?

October 2013 Newsletter - Jumping to Conclusions

One of the greatest impediments to robust problem solving is our tendency to short-circuit the Plan-Do-Study-Adjust (PDSA) cycle and simply jump to conclusions about root causes and solutions. . . . Download PDF to read the full article

You can do low cost iteration anywhere.

Go to the gemba. Go and see. Stand in a circle and observe what's happening with your own eyes. The planners of The Porch in Philadelphia did this in spades for an analysis of how customers were using the new public open space area in front of Philly's 30th Street Station. The data they gathered from simple observation has enabled them to modify and iterate the layout of the space to better serve the community.

University City Design, the organization responsible for creating the open space, wanted to go light, flexible (and cheap) shortly after starting the project, and then study what happened next.

"In the office, we started looking at pictures of Bryant Park, of Rittenhouse Square, and fantasizing about what [this] could be," says Prema Gupta, the director of planning and economic development for UCD, recalling the earlier stages of the whole project. "It's almost like there was a fork in the road. We could have built out that vision at that point, and we would still be fundraising for it, and it would still be a blank stretch of sidewalk."

So they learned that a farmer's market doesn't quite work in The Porch, but a food truck rally does. Bistro chairs are nice, but Luxembourg chairs are better. After all, If you can only afford some lighter interventions, you can at least ensure they serve exactly how people move through and use public space.

UCD's approach is just another example of PDSA skillfully deployed to improve quality and reduce costs. Call it "trystorming," call it 3P, call it MVP, call it "design thinking," call it whatever you want. The important point is that improvements don't -- and shouldn't -- require massive investments in time, money, and resources until you know for sure that the improvement is going to work.

Check out this story, the cool graphs, and analysis at the Atlantic Cities website.

Go and See

We often think about the principle of "go and see" applying to giant companies, where leadership and management is far removed from the front lines. But it applies to small companies, too -- as small as a single coffeehouse. In a NYTimes story about small business mentors, a coffee shop owner explains that It’s usually easier to find new savings than to lure new customers. I don't know anything about running a coffee shop, but I do know a great example of "go and see" when I read it:

“When I had three shops, I was paying a huge amount in garbage bags,” [Mr. Goodall] recalled. “It was $35 for a package of 100” — and he was going through four packages a week. “I thought, ‘How are we going through more than 50 bags a day?’ So I spent the day sitting here, watching. The first thing I noticed was, we were using the most heavy-duty, contractor-grade, carry-a-small-water-buffalo-grade bag. The second thing I noticed was, my baristas were double-bagging.”

Mr. Goodall’s manager explained that the old bags ripped when the baristas dragged them to the Dumpster. So Mr. Goodall instituted a no-dragging policy. To lighten the load and to avoid dragging, he said employees could change bags more often but had to use medium-grade bags only. The stores immediately went from four packages a week at $35 apiece to two packages at $25 — money that dropped directly to the bottom line.

Sure, you could carp about Mr. Goodall instituting a policy rather than having the staff come up with it. And perhaps he could have used some sort of wheeled cart to make the transportation easier. Who knows? We're not there to go and see.

But I do know that first-hand observation is an amazingly powerful tool, no matter the size of the organization. As Mr. Goodall says,

“I could pay myself $4,000 more a year because of that one decision.”

A sheep in sheep's clothing

In working with a client this week, I learned that there can be serious cultural obstacles to embracing structured problem solving (what I'll call "A3 thinking" in this post -- sorry, Jon Miller). A worker at one of my clients recently confessed that she was anxious about talking to colleagues in other departments about her A3. She needed to get background information about how this problem was affecting other areas of the company in terms of cost overruns, rework, etc., but she was afraid that her coworkers would be suspicious of her questions. Even though the company doesn't have the entrenched fiefdoms of a giant 10,000 person firm (it's only about 150 people), there's still a deep-seated wariness of someone from another functional silo poking around. She was also worried that her colleagues would see her questions -- and her A3 -- as merely a cover for her ulterior motive: a justification for her pre-determined and preferred solution.

Creating and sustaining a culture committed to learning and continuous improvement ain't easy -- if it were, we wouldn't still be talking about Toyota. (And I'm looking forward to reading Jon Miller's new book, Creating a Kaizen Culture.) But it seems to me that one critical step is in the process is to undertake A3 thinking with a true spirit of open inquiry.

You can't go into an A3 with a pre-determined solution. The A3 is a vehicle to structure your learning process and help you communicate your learning effectively. It's a visible way to guide your PDSA cycles. It's not a sales technique (although it does ultimately help sell your solution), and it's not a magician's misdirection. To use it in these ways is to breed cynicism, suspicion, and resistance.

An A3 is not a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's just a sheep.

September 2013 Newsletter: Technology Isn't the Answer

When confronted by an operational problem, we often jump to the conclusion that technology must be the solution. But more often than not, we don’t really understand the problem, and technology serves only to make a broken process a little bit faster. Take time to grasp the situation first. Once you really understand the problem, you’ll be able to find a cheaper and more effective solution that’s faster to implement. Download PDF to read the full article

Lean: it's just like backpacking.

As you may know, I've been spending a lot of time working with outdoor companies. My background is in sporting goods & the outdoor industry, and I'm an avid backpacker myself. Recently, I've noticed that building a lean organization focused on continuous improvement has many similarities with the backpacking ethos. 1. Multi-purpose is better than single purpose.  When you backpack, every ounce and every cubic inch is critical, so you look for gear that serves multiple purposes: zip-off pants (long pants and shorts); CamelBak's All Clear purifier (water purifier and bottle); backpacks with tops that convert to fanny packs for day hiking.  When you design a business process, you want to have people who can fulfill multiple functions: customer service agents who can take orders but also work in warrantee; marketing staff who can help with packaging; product developers and designers who can cross the aisle. This flexibility creates greater understanding, improves handoffs, and allows you to flex the workforce to meet sudden demand shifts.

2. A place for everything, and everything in its place. The lean principle of "5S" (essentially, everything neat, clean, and organized in its proper place, with no unneeded items) is critical in backpacking. You can't carry extra gear that you won't use; making and breaking camp is far easier when everything is in its proper place; and cleaning everything before going out is a great way of spotting problems or defects. The same rule holds true on a manufacturing floor or in an office: critical documents should be visible and easily accessible; you can work faster and with fewer errors when you have only the correct and needed information at hand; and you can spot problems or time-sensitive issues when they're segregated appropriately.

3. Flow When you're backpacking, you become acutely aware of issues that impede the smooth flow of camping life. How far away, and how do you get to, the water source? Where will you set up your kitchen? What's the process by which you'll set up your tent? Where will you hang your food? Of course, it's possible to make anything work, but when you're pressed for time, you want all activities to proceed as smoothly as possible. You want them to flow with a minimum of fuss, of rework, of back-and-forth trips to your backpack or your campsite. Similarly, when you're designing an office layout or designing a process, you want to think through the process to ensure that there are as few handoffs as possible, and that there's a minimum of travel time between groups. It's not catastrophic if the credit department has to walk 250 feet to the sales team -- but it's not ideal.

I'll discuss other similarities in a future post. In the meantime, what similarities do you see?