Comments on: Back To The Future

By: kevin kobett

kevin kobett — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 14:02:50 +0000

I think it would be a good idea to give this crib sheet to everyone working for you. This defines expectations and lets everyone build on past successes.

By: motohok

motohok — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 14:46:40 +0000

That is a great idea, toastguy. Thanks

By: kevin kobett

kevin kobett — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 13:46:44 +0000

“Mr. Imai explicitly described the nature of kaizen with many tangible examples”

IMO, the best way to continuously improve the culture is thru stories. Two types of stories, kaizen examples like Mr. Imai and stories that highlight bad behaviors that derail kaizen. These latter stories tell employees, “We know what bad behaviors look like and this is how we counter those costly behaviors. It’s as easy as asking successful innovators, “Who was helpful?” It would be wise to be helpful; good things will happen.”

By: toastguy

toastguy — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 18:43:11 +0000

Thanks for reading, Gary and also for the feeback this year. It keeps me going. 🙂

By: toastguy

toastguy — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 18:39:27 +0000

Thanks for reading Jim. One idea regarding greater visibility for participation — Create a crib sheet for your management team: What was improved or what problem was solved? Where? Who was involved? Then prep your top managers to visit the improvements with a knowldegeable “thank you.” Be sure to coach the visitors to thank the persons who have made the improvement and ALSO thank the team leads and supervisiors that have “created a favorable environment for employees to make improvements.” If you can engineer a few of these visits, it will help to engage management and supervision as well as front line. Don’t overdo it – just a visit or two to start. Don’t want to overburden the managers 🙂

By: brherb

brherb — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 11:46:44 +0000

Great insight unfortunately all too accurate too often .
I have been through the process of “event based” Kaizen and always found it strange and disconnected from daily work. Can now say with pride that it can be done right and does work when the ficus – as you said – becomes small local individual changes.

By: Gary Peterson

Gary Peterson — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 17:11:29 +0000

This is spot-on, Bruce, and as usual, very well expressed. I like everything you said, and am going to offer it up for our people to read. Thanks for always providing such thoughtful writings!

By: Jeff Geisler

Jeff Geisler — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 09:56:13 +0000

Thank you for publishing this article again. I’m not entirely sure what I was doing 10 years ago but I missed it!

The pushing aside, the marginalization, the separation from the center of control of the folks doing the work that you outline in your experience is now pretty much societal wide. Brexit and the Trump election (and no, I’m not making a qualitative comment about either) reflect this deepening divide.

I’m not sure what the solution is but “outsourcing” is not it, and I consider the establishment of “Big Brain” teams in a company or country as falling within my working definition of “outsourcing”.

Given the hours most folks spend on the job, maybe finding a way to give them voice while they earn a living would go a long way to finding a way to bring them back into the cultural fold.

By: kevin kobett

kevin kobett — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 00:45:54 +0000

Nice article. I think it is important to start with kaizen. When someone makes an improvement, ask “Who was helpful?” This will identify the company’s natural lean leaders.

By: Jim Benning

Jim Benning — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 20:52:00 +0000

I have been a subscriber for a couple years and this, to me, was your best article to date.

At our facilities it hard to pull people out for a 3-5 day Kaizen as we don’t seem to have excess human resources. And yes, with successful Kaizens you will free people up who can do more Kaizens…but business is dynamic and this doesn’t seem to happen. Anyway, we have found that 2-hour VSM’s produce tons of small ideas that really add up and the participants love it. The ideas are then transferred to an ITC and we are off! Very exciting.

Our biggest challenge is sharing all the “wins” with the rest of the company, which would go a long way to move the culture forward. I’d like to hear some ideas on that.