While we often remember Chicken Little, really his only transgression was communicating what appeared to him to be a threat.   The great mistake lay with those who listened to Chicken L., and then followed blindly.   Today, there is even a societal malady named after our hero: “Chicken Little Syndrome”, defined as “a sense of despair or passivity which blocks the audience from actions.”

American business it seems to me had been locked in that sense of despair and passivity for a decade, making short-term cash decisions to bolster flagging quarterly earnings – in many cases paper profits fabricated from cursory cost assumptions.  Businesses are going to China, well . . . because other businesses are going to China.

Now come two separate studies from Accenture and Boston Consulting Group that “Chinese net manufacturing costs are rapidly converging on U.S. costs.”  When all cost and competitive factors are considered, it turns out, reshoring manufacturing to America makes good competitive sense.  And from Professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih of Harvard Business School come a revelation that “U.S. innovation declines when manufacturing is offshored because the partnership of manufacturing and engineering is weakened.”

One week to go before the Made Lean in America Northeast Shingo Prize Conference.  Don’t be passive.  Come join the learning, networking and sharing on October 5-6 in Springfield, Massachusetts:   www.neshingoprize.org

See you there!

O.L.D.

Regarding acceptance of lean thinking, Dr. Shingo used a parable to make his point.  This one he named the “Story of the Chimpanzee”, but I’ve taken to calling it the “Story of the Chicken” for reasons that will become apparent in a moment.

According to Shingo, a science experiment was conducted to determine the relative learning rates of different animals.  Each animal was placed in a cage, just out of reach of a plate of food set outside the cage.  At the end of the cage opposite from the food, the cage door was left slightly ajar.  A time measurement was taken for each animal to determine how long each would take to find the unlatched door and retrieve the food.

A chimpanzee was the fastest to find a way to the food, making a hasty exit to his lunch.  Behind the chimp was a pig, who checking the cage perimeter, soon found the unlatched door.  Next came a dog, not as fast as the pig but nevertheless clever enough to discover the way out.  Other animals followed, learning the solution to the problem at different rates, but ultimately prevailing.  “Then,” Doctor Shingo said, “a chicken was placed in the cage.”  The chicken proceeded to the end of the cage nearest to the food and proceeded to peck in the direction of the food.  It never moved from that spot.

The moral to Shigeo Shingo’s parable is that we need to be patient, that people learn at different rates.  But we also need to be aware that occasionally there is a chicken.  Shingo, of course, was not alluding to any particular nationality or occupation (although he frequently liked to take aim at engineers) as he presented his learning experiment.  My mind, however, quickly wandered to several individuals in my organization, who had not yet bought into lean concepts or practices.  There was no clear demographic delineation for those slow learners.  A couple were in management, a few in overhead functions like quality, and more from the office and shop floor.  Some persons were new employees and others had been employees forever. Some were vocally opposed, while others were silent doubters. I took each of these persons as a challenge and used whatever opportunities available to influence their thinking.  [More about that in a later post.]

What I discovered over time – perhaps two years time – was that most of these early dissenters became interested, and some heavily involved, once they had seen results or had been personally impacted by a continuous improvement effort within their own workplace.  Shingo was right, they just learned at different rates.  The best news for me was that there were very few “chickens,” a cause for optimism.  If I had written off the slower adopters early along, I would have lost some of my best long-term improvement people.

Another quote from Dr. Shingo reminds us “95% of objection is cautionary.”  In other words don’t be surprised if everyone doesn’t fall in love with a lean tool or concept immediately.  If you take time to understand and answer their objections they will be inclined to give it try.

To carry Dr. Shingo’s parable forward, I’m hoping to see lots of chimps, plenty of pigs, many dogs, and perhaps even a few chicken at our October 5-6 conference.

How many chickens are there in your organization?  Let me hear from you.

O.L.D.

The graph on the left is our national debt, the one on the right, our trade deficit.

I call this condition TDD:  Trade Deficit Syndrome [Disorder.] America suffers from TDD.

This is not a condition that can be medicated.  But, through Lean, we can effect major behavior modification.  That is the message of Made Lean in America, our 2011 Northeast Shingo Conference:  When goods and services are made in America, we make America strong; and conversely, relinquishing our productive capability causes not only an outflow of American jobs, but also a growing, precipitous national debt.

Is your company suffering from TDD?   Come hear about the cure on October 5-6, 2011 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

O.L.D.

BTW:  When I come in contact with an organization that is producing its product here in the US with mostly US made parts, that’s a big deal.  When that company is then selling 75% of those products outside of the US, that’s a really big deal.  Brookfield Engineering Labs is doing just that, shipping over 75% of their made-in-America products outside of the US.  How do they manage that and how has Lean helped them?  Bob Bishop will share their story at our conference.   Here’s a sneak preview of his presentation: (Click the link or the arrow button to listen)

http://wp.me/p1cOUS-9P

So I asked employees for feedback.  To my surprise many were not even aware that a suggestion program existed, even though a suggestion box was prominently placed near the time clock.  One employee told me the box was only for complaints.  Another, said she knew about the program but referred to it as an idea rejection system.  “It takes forever to hear back about ideas,” he said, “and we don’t even get a decent explanation.”

Some further investigation with the help of our HR department revealed that, though unintended, our locked-box, cost-savings, big-ideas-only suggestion system was indeed an idea rejection system.  We were, on the one hand, promoting “many small changes for the better” through our continuous improvement efforts, while our legacy suggestion box may as well have been a shredder.  Over the next year we experimented with a different approach, eliminating the suggestion box (making ideas public), clarifying criteria, and replacing the cost-savings calculations with a flat cash award of $400, and opened the idea program up to all employees – not just production. This was marginally successful. The number of ideas quadrupled, but given the baseline of 16 ideas per year this was not very good. It turns out that the idea review process was still way too long, as members of the “blue ribbon commission” (BRC) evaluating the ideas still were predisposed to award only for big ideas, that is ideas that significantly impacted product cost savings.

So we dropped the award to $100 to expedite decisions by the BRC. Once again, the number of ideas quadrupled, but still many small ideas were denied.  Employees were insulted.  Good ideas were being delayed or denied because they were “too small.” A BRC member complained, “Why should we award for these small ideas?  They won’t make any difference.”  (This point of view is unfortunately still expressed to me today by some clients.)  But from the employee viewpoint, many improvements were being rejected, improvements that together would have a significant impact on productivity and quality.

In desperation, we dropped the award once more, this time to $25.  We also added a point system for employees to accumulate points for a month-end drawing.  They received points immediately – not dependent upon idea approval.  Everyone was recognized.   Most importantly, approval for ideas could be made at the supervisor level unless the idea required an engineering change. Activity for the BRC was reduced to a low level, as many small ideas were quickly implemented and then reported for the $25 prize.   Numbers of ideas quadrupled once again, and participation rose to nearly 100%. In the process we realized that the only “small” thing about small ideas was that they were easy to implement – no time or expense.   Some of the small ideas were $1 ideas and some were $10,000 ideas, most were in between. Without fully understanding the shift in thinking, we were now recognizing the act of having an idea rather than setting employees up for rejection.

How is your idea system working?  Does it need improvement?  Let me hear from you.

O.L.D.

BTW  Alan Robinso,n author of best-selling Ideas Are Free, will be with us on October 5-6 in at the 2011 Northeast Shingo Conference. For a sneak preview of his presentation, click on this link or the arrow below. http://wp.me/p1cOUS-9x

The leaders of this charge we call statesmen (and women), persons who are able to fashion compromise between many disparate groups.  They are beholden to the voices of so many customers,  it seems impossible at times that any change could be effected.  Yet these public sector leaders are able somehow to create many small changes for the better to enable the monument to move slightly.  Could we call that government kaizen?

The State of Maine calls it “Bending the Curve.”   Listen to Walter Lowell, Director of the Office of Lean Management for Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, describe Maine’s five-year effort to improve quality, shorten lead-time and reduce costs in Maine State government.   As the program has gained traction it has become a model for improvement in our publc sector, Lean’s next big frontier.

Here’s a sneak preview podcast of his upcoming presentation at our October 5-6 Northeast Shingo Conference.

(If you cannot see the audio player below, please visit http://wp.me/p1cOUS-9n to hear the sneak preview podcast.)

The conference is just around the corner.  Enroll now and you may be the winner of a complete set of GBMP DVD’s – over two dozen titles including four new products to be released at the conference.  Hope to see you there.

O.L.D.

Last November, when we announced the theme of our 2011 Northeast Shingo Conference, Made Lean In America, one of those experts contacted me with a sincere request that I not raise false hopes for American manufacturing.   In fairness, he did not say that it’s impossible for American industry to compete, rather that we lack the passion to do what is necessary to keep manufacturing on our shores.

I disagree, as I see this passion in many individuals and organizations in our region.   But it’s not only about passion.    “Doing what is necessary,” requires a great deal of rationality as well.  One of our speakers, Reshoring Initiative founder, Harry Moser, will explain why Re-shoring manufacturing is a critical step in most lean journeys.  Conference attendees will also receive his
organization’s free software to calculate the true benefit of re-shoring.  Take a few moments to hear a sneak preview of Harry Moser’s presentation.

(If you can’t play the audio from this email, please visit http://wp.me/p1cOUS-95 to hear it on the blog.)

Hope we see you in October. Come show your passion, network, learn, share, steal, absorb, celebrate and rejuvenate.

O.L.D.

Harry Moser

Of the four parts of the IDR it was probably not a coincidence that the Pink Copy went to the area where the defect – oops, discrepancy – was thought to have originated.  On the root cause analysis section of the IDR, the word “workmanship” frequently appeared.  Perhaps it should have been a checkbox to save time.

Before we began our Lean odyssey, I think we mostly used only one of the five whys.   Our root cause analysis was pretty shallow.   Consequently, our corrective action looked more like fault assignment.  Comments in the corrective action section of the IDR read like “employee was spoken to” or “re-training.” In the end, IDR’s were a means to round up the usual suspects.

The problem however was not really with the IDR or the word “discrepancy” (which essentially was intended to avoid pre-judgment), but with the fact that the culture at the time tended to presume guilt.  One employee warned me “Be careful if you report a problem, they may blame you.”  We had an apparent process in the IDR whose purpose was to identify and correct problems, but the actual process discouraged reporting problems

So how important is your culture to effective problem-solving?   Want to learn more about building a problem-solving organization?   Take a couple minutes to hear this sneak preview of Jamie Flinchbaugh’s keynote presentation at our October 5-6 Made Lean in America conference in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Hope to see you at the conference.

O.L.D.

In truth we had many plans – too many plans:   There was a quality system to be installed, and a new computer system, and there were layout changes on the factory floor and in the office.  There were new product plans and plans for new resources to build them.  And finally there were Lean type initiatives to shorten lead-time and reduce cost.  I used to joke, “We’re drowning in opportunities.  The problem is deciding what to do first.”

Dr. Fukuda’s projection however, suggested a bigger problem: Not only were there too many improvement projects vying for scarce resources, but there was a likelihood that without a unifying direction and method for alignment, certain projects would work at cross-purposes to others.  Our discovery from the one-week workshop was that while each department thought it had clear marching orders, when the various plans were overlaid, they resembled Dr. Fukuda’s swizzle sticks.

Today, I see a similar problem almost everywhere I go.  Recently I gave a homework assignment to a client to list all key improvements on a single page.  Two weeks later they sheepishly handed me a sheet printed in six point type.  “It’s the only way we could fit them on the page,” they declared.  The priorities were broken out by department.

“Why so many?”  I asked.  After some discussion, two chief reasons for the volume emerged:

1. Their quality system required them to identify areas annually for quality improvement.  Owing to insufficient resources, few of these priorities could actually be addressed soon, but it was sufficient that they be identified.  Many had been carried over from year to year.
2. Managers each received many additional objectives relating to cost or delivery.  Like the departments they managed, the managers themselves were infinitely loaded down — drowning in opportunities.

Taking a page from Dr. Fukuda, I asked, “How do you know all of these priorities are aligned?”

“We don’t,” a manager quipped, ‘this is the first time we’ve seen them all together on one page.”

Another manager noted that indeed some of the various projects did conflict.  Some cost cutting projects in department A, for example, would have a negative impact on quality or delivery priorities in a downstream function.   And everyone agreed that there were more priorities than could possibly be addressed in a year.  There were too many goals and too few means.  “We work on the hot ones,” one manager added.

“Too much manager-work-in-process,”, I replied, “like trying to fit 10 pounds of potatoes in a five pound bag.”

“More like a hundred pounds,” an engineer exclaimed, “I feel like I’m spending 5% of my time on twenty projects, and almost nothing gets done.”

“How do we get out of this mess?” a top manager interjected.

I replied to her, “My own experience is that policy deployment isn’t an overnight success.  But it starts with the question you just asked.  It’s a new way of thinking that challenges the same mindsets as on the shop floor: push production, high inventory and local efficiency.   So let’s start by agreeing on what’s most important to the customer and then aligning improvement projects regardless of department to the customer need.  Then lets agree to limit the manager-work-in-process to enable these projects to flow.”

“But how do we know what’s most important to work on?, the top manager persisted.

I had asked Dr. Fukuda the very same question in 1989.   So I responded to her with the same answer Dr. Fukuda gave me: “You’re the manager!”

Are you drowning in opportunities?  Let me hear from you.

O.L.D.  (More on this topic in a later post.)

BTW.  Don’t miss upcoming podcasts from presenters who will be at the October 5-6 Northeast Shingo Conference.

In April 1989, the first Shingo Prize for Manufacturing Excellence had just been awarded at Utah State University.  Dr. Shigeo Shingo was on hand at this auspicious event to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the university and also to bestow his name on the Prize.  I had the honor of meeting and speaking with Dr. Shingo on this occasion, and invited him to visit my company, United Electric, if he ever was in Massachusetts.  I really had no expectation that this would ever occur. To my amazement however, Dr. Shingo did happen to be ‘be in the area’ shortly after the Utah conference, visiting his publisher, and took this opportunity to pay a short visit.  The story of his visit has been told in three parts of which this is Part 3.    In some ways this post is like a three-act play, the first two acts dealing with UE employees’ momentous reception for Shingo, and the second describing his observations on the factory floor.  [Readers who have not read the previous two entries might want to peruse these installments first to develop context.]  The final “act”, which takes place in a Boston-area restaurant that had been researched by his sponsors from Productivity Press to offer the most authentic Japanese cuisine in the area, provides a vignette of Dr. Shingo himself and his reflections on his contribution to manufacturing productivity:

After his trip to Utah State University, Dr. Shingo commented to his sponsors that, while the snow-capped mountains around Logan Utah reminded him of home, he’d not had a home-cooked Japanese meal since he had landed in the US.  Dr. Shingo was longing for a good Japanese meal.  When his gracious visit to our company was concluded, we invited him to dine with us “at a good Japanese restaurant.”   Our party of perhaps 18 persons took the restaurant by storm, other customers sensing the presence of a dignitary.  Dr. Shingo, oblivious to other activity around him, promptly called the waitress to his side and began in Japanese to ask questions about the menu. Unfortunately, this Japanese/American waitress spoke only English.  Apologetically she retreated to find an interpreter.   As it turned out, the only Japanese-speaking employee in the entire restaurant was the cook, who accompanied the waitress to our table.  This suited Dr. Shingo perfectly.  He had found his way to the source – the shop floor — and began a lengthy conversation with the cook.  Not speaking Japanese, I could still glean that the cook and Dr. Shingo had established a connection, and there was as much reminiscing as food-ordering taking place.  With much laughter between the two, the exchange continued for several minutes while the rest of the party sat awkwardly.

His conversation with the cook had put Dr. Shingo in a mood to talk.  First, through his interpreter, Shingo announced that he had already ordered his meal – something special, not on the menu.  And because he believed that this cook was the real deal, Dr. Shingo let us know that he had also ordered an additional meal to-go.  He joked that he had taken these steps to reduce the external set-up.  We all laughed as Shingo continued with his oft-told story of the banana peel (related in at least two of his books): We as customers do not buy the banana for the peel.  Suppliers should always understand value from the customer’s perspective and provide only that.

Next, Dr. Shingo took aim at engineers, one of his popular targets, describing three kinds of engineers that prevent improvement:

• Table Engineers – those who just sit around a table and talk about problems
• Catalog Engineers – engineers who think the solution to every problem can be found in a catalog, and
• Nyet Engineers – engineers who say no to every request.  (Nyet is Russian for “no.”)

I don’t think Dr. Shingo realized that our CEO, Bob Reis, was an engineer by training.  Bob, bristling a bit, responded as Dr. Shingo finished his story, “Well, I’m a Can-do engineer!”  Shingo smiled.  Continuing on, Dr. Shingo mentioned that his name, roughly translated meant “changing red lights to green” and that he had always felt that was his life’s purpose: to change red lights to green on the shop floor.  This brought a tear to my eye as I reflected on how many red lights had turned to green on my shop floor as a result of Shingo’s contributions.

When Dr. Shingo finished his meal he announced that he would take a short nap – and he did.  Table conversation continued as he power-napped (another concept ahead of its time in 1989) for several minutes.  Suddenly, a rejuvenated Dr. Shingo awakened with the announcement that he would sing a Japanese folk song about turning red lights to green.  Not shy, he belted it out as startled patrons turned to observe.  It was a surrealistic moment capping a memorable visit.  I wished I’d understood the lyrics, as this was his grand finale.  He sang with a passion that was the hallmark of his life’s work, and when he finished, he grabbed his boxed meal for take-out and said it was time to go.

O.L.D.

Don’t forget the Northeast Shingo Conference, our best ever, coming up on October5-6 in Springfield, Massachusetts.   My next few posts will contain links to podcasts of conference speakers.  Stay tuned. 

She thought for a moment and then replied, “About one  month’s worth of inventory is good.  Any more than that is a problem.”

Pointing to stacks of material that lined the shop floor,  I asked, “So that inventory is good?”  “Yes,” she replied, “That’s all good – it’s sold.”

“So you’ve already received cash for it?” I asked.  “No,” she replied impatiently, “but we will soon.”

I decided not to push the concept at that moment, but reflected on how much wiggle room is built into the word “excess.”    I see the word used frequently to describe several of the seven wastes.  “Excess” is used to modify the waste of Motion also.  I wonder why.  I’ve not yet seen a poster that allows for  “excess defects”, although we might as well use that phrase too since most acceptable quality levels (AQL) are well above zero.  Even six sigma provides a little wiggle room for defects.

The problem with the wiggle room is that it modifies an ideal condition to become an “acceptable” one.  In the case of the company above, batches of inventory totaling one month were considered good.  More or less than that amount is not especially important.   What’s important is that the concept of an ideal condition has been lost.

How remarkably different the situation is in organizations that maintain the ideal:  Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting with Dr. Sami Bahri at his dental clinic in Jacksonville, Florida.   Dr. Bahri , who has been called the world’s “First Lean Dentist,” explained to me how he and his staff pursue the goal of “single patient flow.”

“We began with the simple procedures, like imaging and cleaning, with the goal of completing the patient’s complete procedure in a single visit.  Next we added simple dental procedures, and then crowns.  We’ve adopted quick changeover, pull systems and other lean methods to approach the ideal of one by one patient flow for every procedure.  We’re not there yet, but we work towards the ideal every day.”

The vision of one patient flow is pervasive and persistent at the *Bahri Dental Practice* giving rise to minute-by-minute problem solving and improvement.  This remarkable clinic has no place for wiggle room.

How much wiggle room do you allow in your organization?   Let me hear from you.

O.L.D.

BTW.  Dr. Sami Bahri will be presenting at our  NE Shingo Conference, October 5-6, Springfield MA.