Twenty-three years ago, after my factory had received some press recognition as a Shingo Prize (now the Shingo Institute) recipient, requests for plant tours began to roll in.   In 1990 there weren’t yet many tour sites available, so the visits were plentiful; we referred to ourselves jokingly as Tours R Us.  In truth, we were early on on our improvement curve, but still a little farther along than many factories.  We accepted the tours because it gave our employees a chance to learn by teaching.

One memorable request came from the author of a then popular book on leadership.  He expressed a desire to listen in on a team meeting, a perfect opportunity to showcase our employees and to learn from an industry expert.   A cross-functional team that was meeting on the day of his visit provided a good sandbox for our visiting expert.  I don’t recall the exact problem the team was trying to solve, but I clearly remember that the meeting was unusually contentious.  We promoted openness in our team discussions, so this situation was not unusual, just on the high end of normal.

The tenor of the meeting’s discussion rose as frustrated participants sparred over questioned data and missed project assignments.   I glanced occasionally to our visitor whose visage began to show signs of concern.  Our Punch-and-Judy approach was perhaps less civilized than he had anticipated. While meeting protocols were followed – agenda, timekeeper, and minutes – it soon occurred to me that we might have needed a sergeant-at-arms as well.   I recalled my mother’s words, and resolved to say something positive to keep the meeting on track and let our visitor know that we could indeed work together as team.  I addressed the group, “You know, this team has accomplished a great deal in the last month, let’s not lose sight of that.”

Eddie V., an outspoken team member responded directly, “Well, I don’t think we’ve made hardly any progress, and pretending we have is not going to help the situation.”

Suddenly I felt like proverbial manager defending the status quo.  The room was silent for a moment. Our visitor glanced again to me wondering how I would respond.  “Yes, you’re right in one sense, Eddie,” I said.  “We should be working harder to solve the problem. You think the glass is half empty and I think it’s half full.  Perhaps we’d all be better served if we focus on the half-empty viewpoint.”

The team then continued its discussion and soon the meeting ended.  The encounter felt dysfunctional to me, and one side of me was privately embarrassed that we could not put on a positive face for our visitor.  But Eddie’s retort stuck with me as a reminder that the answer to the rhetorical question “Is the glass half empty or half full?” is:

“Yes!”   The glass that is half full is also still half empty. Management optimism untempered by a little bit of reality may be construed as complacency.

O.L.D.

BTW: Another “Tea Time with the Toast Dude Webinar” is fast approaching.  Please join me for a free 40-minute webinar next Tuesday, November 12 at 3:00 p.m. EST.  The topic: “Why So Few Ideas” will focus on gaining better participation in your idea system.  Click here to register on-line. 

Several weeks before Ford Motor Company celebrated its centennial, another hundred-year anniversary marked the passing of Eji Toyoda at age 100.  Credited with championing the entry of Toyota into U.S, Eji Toyoda was instrumental in forging a collaboration between General Motors and Toyota to form NUMMI in Fremont, California. Later, under his leadership Toyota grew in size and stature to become the standard for product excellence and customer satisfaction.  

In an ironic centennial  twist, Toyoda traveled to the US in 1950 to study at Ford’s Rouge plant, considered then to be the world’s most productive auto plant.  At that time Ford employees could out produce Toyoda workers by a 700% margin.  Toyoda grasped the strength of the Ford system, particularly its emphasis on flow.   But Mr. Toyoda also noted the production system’s inherent inflexibility and, more significantly, its top down and compartmentalized decision-making.  Material flowed, but not ideas.  Quality was not confirmed at the source.  Shop floor employees were only eyes and hands.  The Ford technical approach may have been preeminent, but its social practices revealed a great weakness.  Ford’s weakness became Toyota’s strength.  Today, the “Toyota Way” developed under Eji Toyoda’s leadership is still mostly ignored by most business leaders.  The buzz is all about investment in technical innovation (a code word for automation), but there is little discussion on the innovative development of people.  

How about in your organization?  Are you building employees as well as products?  Share a story.

 O.L.D.

BTW:  Hope you’ll join me for my next Tea Time With The Toast Guy Webinar:

Unlearning — Overcoming Six Basic Status Quo Predispositions. 

Alas, practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent.  Unlearning bad management practices can be far more challenging than learning good ones. The first step to unlearning them is to recognize and acknowledge them.  My thirty-minute webinar will cover six of the biggest management preconceptions along with ideas to overcome them.  I’ll be on line from 3:00-3:40 p.m. on Tuesday, October 15. It’s free!  Click here to register and join in.     

One of my posts from about three years ago (worth reading for context if you don’t remember it), entitled Rowing, relates a story about the second point, “getting everyone rowing.” The rowing analogy was shared with me (on a cocktail napkin) by Ryuji Fukuda, a Deming Prize Winner and author of Managerial Engineering (after 25 years, still one of the best Lean transformation books.)

Dr. Fukuda advocated that to get everyone rowing, it’s important first to provide full support for the “red-faced” employees, the ones who are already rowing, and second to find ways to engage those who are “in the boat but not yet rowing.”  As for the employees who are not even in the boat: Spending time with them is insulting to the employees who are already in the boat.

As a manager who spent far too much time trying to gather in “the lost sheep,” at the expense of the red-faced employees, this was an important lesson for me.

What was missing from the 1990 cocktail napkin rendering, however, was the “right direction” piece.   Today, many organizations provide alignment through a variety of policy deployment tools, town hall meetings, morning huddles and such.  But are these various mechanisms sufficient?  The Pied Piper of Hamelin, after all, provided total alignment for the town’s rat population, running them all over a cliff.  Taiichi Ohno, regarded as the primary creator of TPS (aka Lean), recognized that an organization’s philosophy must precede its strategy.  More recently that philosophy was put forth by the Toyota Production System Support Center with a further analogy:  True North - a set of fundamental guiding principles for transforming your organization.

So I’ve taken artistic liberty to add management into the boat. The red-faced manager at the helm is first making sure the boat’s heading is True North, and then doing his/her best to get everybody in the boat rowing in that direction.

True North is the theme for this year’s annual Northeast Region Shingo Prize Conference in Hyannis, Massachusetts.  It’s only a week away now.  Please don’t miss this very affordable opportunity to share with and learn from over 600 lean experts and practitioners how True North principles can transform your organization.

Check out the official daybook here and sign up today.  I’ll be looking for you  : )

O.L.D

One day, to raise money for the day care center we held an old fashioned barbecue, food donations courtesy of a local packinghouse and recipes provided by Mr. Hightower.  The day was memorable both for the spirit of cooperation and, of course, Sam’s fried chicken.

“Sam,” I said at the end of the day, “You have such a talent for cooking.  You can take simple ingredients and create the most delicious meals.”

“Yeah,” Sam replied,  I got pretty good at cooking thanks to the Florida Department of Corrections.”

“Oh,” I inquired, “Why were you in?”

“Manslaughter,” he replied.  “Killed a young man in a fight when I was 19.”

“So you were a cook in prison,” I concluded.

“Oh, yeah!”  exclaimed Mr. Hightower with an ironic grin on his face, “The warden liked my cooking so much that I could never get paroled.  He told me he couldn’t let me out until he found another good cook.”

“How long did that take?” I asked Sam Hightower.

“Well I was in prison almost 40 years, and he never found another cook he liked as much as me; but when he retired I was paroled.  So I guess it all worked out.”

The irony of being so good that you can’t be replaced is something I revisit often in factories, offices and clinics.  The working conditions may be better than at Florida State Prison, but there is nevertheless a caste system that locks talented employees in fixed positions.  One employee put it to me this way recently: “Irreplaceable equals un-promotable.”

Do you develop the full potential of all your employees or just a few?   Do you have any employees who are too irreplaceable to promote?  Let me hear from you.

O.L.D.

BTW:  Less than two weeks to go before our Northeast Region Shingo Conference.  Over 600 passionate Lean leaders from more than 100 organizations will gather to learn, share and network.  Don’t be left out!

Click to Register

We apologize for the horrible timing however GBMP’s websites are undergoing intermittent maintenance (gbmp.org and neshingoprize.org). In the meantime, we are making all of the information about the upcoming Northeast Shingo Prize Conference available here, to make sure you have access to it whenever you need it. (Please note that our online store for terrific lean training products, www.shopgbmp.org, is still open for business. )

Conference Overview

“True North,” an idiom that emerged from Toyota twenty years ago, connotes the compass for Lean transformation, a set of guiding principles that give purpose and direction to the technical aspects of operational excellence.  Two decades later, while many organizations have gained a modest benefit from Lean technical improvements, the power of True North principles has eluded them.  Most have hit plateaus well below their potentials, unable to sustain improvement and receive the full benefits of Lean transformation. But a few organizations outside of Toyota have emerged as True North beacons; companies that have learned Lean tools are necessary, but not sufficient to create sustainable improvement.  The 2013 Northeast region Shingo Prize Conference will focus on successful application of True North principles, bringing together managers, shop floor teams, and industry experts from these successful North American lean transformations to share their True North success stories – the obstacles they faced in setting a new course to world class and the success they gather once on course. The Northeast region Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence, sponsored by GBMP an education partner of the Shingo Prize will celebrate its 25^th anniversary of the Prize at its annual conference September 24-25 at the Hyannis Resort & Conference Center, in Hyannis, Massachusetts. Our theme for 2013:  “True North – set your course and make waves”.

The event features four Keynotes -(Gary Peters from OC Tanner, Dr. John Toussaint from Thedacare, Art Byrne, author of The Lean Turnaround and Tom Hartman from Autoliv), four new hands-on lean training simulations, a dozen companies in The Community of Lean Lounge, twelve super sponsors, 40+ break out sessions, a super fun party with live music, The Silver Toaster for Employee Engagement in Lean presentation, and the best lean networking and benchmarking all year long! Did we mention it’s on gorgeous Cape Cod, in Hyannis Massachusetts! Click here for info on getting to Hyannis and lodging.

So, should you attend? YES!
Need more convincing? Check out the below links -

The Agenda at a Glance
A Brief Video about the Event
Preview the actual Daybook

Note the Inflation Buster pricing below – same prices as 2012!
And NEW this year: register online & pay with a credit card. How convenient!
We also permit attendees to “split” tickets….send a different person each day, only $100 more.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call us at 617-287-7630

The easiest way to register is online HERE

Or call us at 617-287-7630 to register over the phone.

Who buys eggs without opening them to check for cracks?  Because the industry has decided that cracks are ‘unavoidable’, we, the customers, routinely inspect for broken eggs.  Most persons I meet, outside of a few in purchasing or quality, have never even heard of AQL or the statistics behind it, but all are routinely subjected to its outcome.  I first became aware of AQL in an oblique fashion when I worked in an IT department attempting to implement MRP.  One of about two dozen order modifiers provided in our MRP software, AQL, was the means by which our buyers enabled suppliers to pass inspection for incoming material with defects.  If incoming material could not pass a 1% AQL, it might be tweaked to 1.5%.   We unfortunately decided that inspecting defective lots was sometimes  more tolerable than running out of parts.  After a time, it became our standard, just like checking for cracked eggs.

For the last decade, more or less, I’ve carried an egg carton with me to customers as a prop.  The message attached to the egg carton  is this:

“The only acceptable level of quality from the customer standpoint is zero defects.”

This fundamental principle behind Shigeo Shingo’s zero quality control became a turning point for me in my own understanding.  As customers we should not consider any other level ‘tolerable.’  Once I seriously adopted this principle as a customer, our suppliers became better suppliers  — and we, too, became a better supplier to our customers.

Restated from a supplier’s perspective we say “Never pass a defect.”  That’s the ideal condition for our customer.   To emphasize this thinking, I’ve returned once more to the carton of eggs with a short video vignette about passing defects.   It’s taken from a new GBMP DVD entitled True North In A Nutshell.  Have a laugh: http://youtu.be/MQrB-HIJWlk .  (When was the last time you had egg on your face?   Share a story.)

We’ll release the True North DVD at our Northeast Shingo Conference in Hyannis, Massachusetts, September 24-25 … less than two weeks away!  Hope to see you there.

O.L.D. 

BTW:  My next free webinar, “Tea Time with the Toast Dude”, entitled Managing Up (click to sign up) is coming up next Tuesday, September 10 at 3:00 p.m.  I’ve had many requests to weigh in on this subject.  And one lucky participant will win a free registration to our Northeast Region Shingo Conference.

A century after the first Labor Day celebration, during a factory re-organization, I discovered firsthand the meaning of “territorial imperative.” Removing organizational boundaries within the shop is one thing, but when you venture into the ‘professional’ parts of the company that’s challenging the natural order!  One office manager, call him Tom, adamantly opposed the idea of moving his department to the floor, next to his internal customer.  Tom had been a good manager and dependable ally during early improvements to the factory floor, but now that his department was directly impacted, he acted as though they were being sucked into a vortex of lesser status.   In a move to provide better internal communication and customer service, factory overhead departments had all been relocated the factory floor. The privacy and seclusion of offices was replaced by open spaces, desks with no cubicles, departments with no walls, and a company receptionist positioned on a raised platform, high enough that she could tell at a glance if someone what at his desk or bench to take an incoming call.  We told our customers “When you call our factory, you’re really calling the factory!”    

While both the internal customer (the factory) and our external customers appreciated the improved service derived from this open concept, Tom had a nagging concern:  “Both my parents worked in a factory their entire lives in order to send me to college and get my masters degree so I wouldn’t have to work in a factory.  This just feels wrong to me.”  I recall getting a bit defensive and suggesting to Tom, “Well I’m sure there are still plenty of companies around who’ll be looking for a persons in three-piece suits.”  I should have been more respectful.  Problem was (and still is) that somewhere along the way from 1894 to 1994, making things had become unimportant – trivialized by visionaries who predicted three-day workweeks.     

So much has changed since the first official Labor Day in 1894 when nearly everybody in the work force would have been classified direct labor.  Today the ratio between direct and indirect labor is somewhere in the 1:4 range.  To be sure, technological changes have effected a good deal of this change if not all for the better.  Still, the trivialization of the frontline worker – the one for whom this holiday was established – continues unabated, increasingly isolating them from those indirect, supposed support services.  In many cases the Gemba is no longer even onshore.   

I have a lighthearted modest proposal for future Labor Days: Let’s make them only for non-exempt employees.  They can have the barbeques; the rest of us professionals can go to work.  

Happy Labor Day! 

O.L.D.

A couple reminders: 
My next free webinar, “Tea Time with the Toast Dude”, entitled Managing Up (click to sign up) is coming up Tuesday, September 10 at 3:00 p.m.  I’ve had many requests to weigh in on this subject.  And one lucky participant will win a free registration to our Northeast Region Shingo Conference in Hyannis, MA, September 24-25.  Time is drawing near for our conference.  Don’t miss it!  

The answer is, no, I haven’t made anything up; I don’t need to.  There’s a world of rich material regarding management Lean faux pas.  I’ve only changed names and occasionally venues in my stories in order to protect the innocent – or sometimes guilty.  In fact, I’ve probably made enough blunders so far in my career, let’s call them learning experiences, that I don’t really have to draw on other people’s experiences.  I use those mainly as corroborating evidence.   And the further corroborating evidence from some my reader’s responses is a constant reminder of the elephant in the room: archaic management systems that reward counterproductive behavior – both in employees and managers.  Here’s’ a recent example, with links to some posts from the past.

Last week I commented to a client, that he should be suspicious when he went to floor to observe.  He objected that being suspicious of employees did not show respect to them.  “Oh, no,” I replied, “I don’t mean suspicious of the employees, I mean suspicious of the system that encourages their behavior and of the so-called standards that bound and judge their work.”  Hiroyuki Hirano suggested that the correct frame of mind for change leaders should be “The current system is the worst possible.”  This mantra was recommended as a countermeasure to defending the status quo, but at more than a few work sites that I’ve visited this perspective seems to have been literally accurate.  It’s mystifying how systems that are so clearly inhibitive to improvement can continue to exist.

If I pick on management from time to time it’s only to highlight the management  system shortfalls in which they also toil and to which they also turn a blind eye  That’s the elephant in the room.   Just as a front line employee may adapt to a broken wheel on a cart or a computer that must be re-booted hourly to fix a software glitch,  management will adapt to and accommodate a broken system.   For many of us, it’s easier to ‘go with the flow’ even it’s flowing in the wrong direction .  The so-called upstream swimmers are fighting a stiff current of obsolete policies.  Here’s to the upstream swimmers!  As I approach year four of the OldLeanDude blog (and 700 followers), I salute you all and thank you for reading and commenting.   You are my inspiration.

And for those few persons in management who are keepers of policy, a reminder:  You have built these up over many years.  They may be difficult to change, but they are not immutable – and they won’t change themselves.  Why not pick a single policy today that seems to be thwarting your continuous improvement and be suspicious of it?   Ask why five times, and help those upstream swimmers out.

Can you think of a policy, standard or norm within your work that would be a good candidate for the 5 Whys?  Please share it with us.

O.L.D.

Reminder: My next FREE webinar, “Tea Time with the Toast Dude”, entitled Managing Up (click to read more and pre-register) is coming up Tuesday, September 10 at 3:00 p.m.  I’ve had many requests to weigh in on this subject.  And one lucky participant will win a free registration to our Northeast Region Shingo Conference in Hyannis, MA, September 24-25.   Hope you can join me.

I opened a fortune cookie yesterday, which read:

“Understanding little is better than misunderstanding a lot.”   Seems to me that we Lean wannabes misunderstand a lot – maybe not everyone, but I regretfully include myself in misunderstanding-a-lot group.   There is so much to know about the Toyota Production System that one lifetime of study and trial and error is not enough for most of us.  I wonder sometimes if Lean has become the abridged version of TPS, structured as a tack-on to existing policy and practice.

 Key concepts like Kaizen, for example, are reduced to buzzwords, and means are confused with ends (a concern voiced by Shigeo Shingo four decades ago.)  After forty years of kaizening, most organizations I visit are still counting the number of events to evaluate their Lean Transformations. 

 In many cases the tools that are supposed to engage employees as agents of change, treat them instead as objects of change.  One company I worked with a couple of years ago stipulated in my contract that I could never use the word Kaizen in the presence of employees as their previous experience with it had been so unpleasant.  “We call it the BOHICA method,” one employee related to me.  [You’ll have to translate the acronym for yourself.] How can such a wonderful concept that should be developing employees become so infuriating to them?  In the name of Continuous Flow, his company had mashed together a sequence of once distant individual operations that did indeed reduce lot and process delay for the part, but at the same time created an unsafe condition for the operators. “My hands are in and out of caustic chemicals all day long in this new set-up” the operator related.  “They tell me to wear gloves, but I can’t manage the detail part of the work wearing gloves, so I have to put them on and remove them every five minutes. It’s impossible to keep the chemicals off of my hands.”   (The manager of this factory expressed frustration that shop employees were ‘not engaged.’  Small wonder.)

 Checkbox-type diagnostics based upon cursory observation of presence or absence of specific tools have also become commonplace: 

• See kanban signage?  Check P. But the factory is scheduled by MRP.  
• Are tools and materials in set locations?  Check P.  Are those the right locations for the persons who use them?  Who knows?
• Are Andon lights in place?  Check P.  Are they ever used?  No. 

Factory managers, unfortunately are graded often more on appearance than reality.  Checkbox audits are tied to compensation.   

In the name of visual control, factory and office wall space is wallpapered with slick graphics and slogans.  Automated production boards provide “real-time” data (a topic for a future post), but for whom?  These trappings look good for customer tours, but they are often irrelevant to the people who do the work.  

Altogether, many so-called Lean Transformations are bodies without souls represented by physical and procedural changes that lack the “know-why.”   They parrot the language of TPS in the name of customer value, but they lack a conceptual foundation, especially ‘respect for people.’  They seek improvement, but only as ancillary programs without a guiding compass.  (Our upcoming 2013 Northeast Region Shingo Conference, True North, to be held in Hyannis, Mass., September 24-25, takes up this critical topic.) 

 Is your Lean journey guided by the Force (True North) or are you in danger of falling to the Dark Side?  Is Lean like the Dark Side at your company or is it close to true TPS?  Share a thought. 

 O.L.D. 

 BTW: My next free webinar, “Tea Time with the Toast Dude”, entitled Management Kaizen (click to sign up) is coming up next Tuesday, August 13 at 3:00 p.m.   One lucky participant will win a free registration to our fall conference.   Hope you can join me. 

Summer time is synonymous for me with a trip to the amusement park.  I took my twins to Wonderland Park when they were just four years old, a déjà vu experience that transported me be back fifty years.  As my kids climbed onto the fire engine ride, I realized that this was the very same ride that I had loved when I was four years old.  Amidst the other high speed, high tech amusements, the fire engines existed in sharp relief, harkening to a simpler time period when children’s imagination required fewer bells and whistles.  Not being an especially nostalgic person, I was nonetheless impressed by the staying power of this simple amusement.  A line of enthusiastic children still waited in queue for this ride; same as when I was a kid.

Last summer, I noticed someone working on the fire engines just before the park opened for business, and felt compelled to let him know, “This ride is older than me.  I used to ride these engines when I was a kid. How do you keep them in such good shape?”

The maintenance tech smiled and replied, “We take care to lubricate the moving parts and we pretty much know what wears and when service will be needed.  These old engines don’t do much, but they’ve carried delighted kids for millions of miles. I would expect that your grandchildren will also be riding these engines at some point.  We’ve learned a lot about them over the years and we keep them in better than new condition.”

More recently, I had a similar exchange at a local factory with a machine shop manager.  Pointing to an ancient grinding machine, the manager echoed the thoughts from the amusement park:  “This old grinder doesn’t do much – no bells or whistles like many of our newer machines – but what it does do it does very consistently.”   “How do you keep it in such good shape?” I asked.  His reply: “We know this machine very well, where and when it will need service.  We treat it well and it returns the favor.”

Thoughtful preventative maintenance, be it at an amusement park, a factory, a laboratory or an operating room, creates a stable environment that favors safety, productivity and continuous improvement.  Yet, regular PM continues to be more of an exceptional condition rather than the norm.  There are so many simple opportunities to maintain equipment that just hide in plain sight, invisible to operators and maintenance techs.  The costs too are hidden in longer run times, injuries, defects, customer service and employee frustration.

Is your de facto standard  “run to failure”?   Do you see the simple opportunities to maintain your equipment in better than new condition or are they invisible to you?  Please share a story — and check out Seeing the Invisible, on sale beginning Monday July 29, 2013 at www.shopgbmp.org.

O.L.D.

BTW:  Don’t forget…August 13 is my second webinar, “Tea Time with the Toast Dude”, 3:00 – 3:45 pm (Eastern), the topic: Management Kaizen…one of my favorites. And of course, the 9th Annual Northeast Shingo Conference is fast approaching – September 24-25 in Hyannis MA. The line up looks great and the benchmarking and networking is always terrific. I can’t wait and hope to see you there!