Koen, thanks for your comments and examples. Your right that to switch to lean leadership has to not only be committed but understand that to be successful they have to totally change the culture of their organization. Lean can’t exist in a top down “shut up and do as I say” environment. Making sure all kaizen teams are half hourly and half salaried is a step in the right direction but it will take time for managers at the supervisor level to change the way they act and for operators to believe that their ideas will be heard. Without the CEO pushing to make sure this happens not much will change.

Phil, thanks for your nice comments. I’m glad you enjoyed the post. Art.

Owen, thanks for your great editions to the post. I agree with your analysis that we shouldn’t expect leaders to vary very much from what they have been taught and experienced. Getting this to change is the ongoing challenge for lean. Your example of MBA programs is a good one as most teach no lean or if they do it is just a minor elective. I don’t see any silver bullet solution here. At the same time there is hope as all of us who have been successful at lean came out of the same educational and working experiences you point out yet were able to see a better way and change. So there is hope but progress will continue to be slow I think.

Can we blame the way the vast majority of CEOs and other senior managers think if their education and experience have been at the other end of the spectrum from Lean?

As I said in my response to Dan, the Lean movement seems to avoid taking on the B-Schools and what they teach in their MBAs. Do you know of an MBA degree which has as its foundation Lean? At best, Lean is taught as a forgettable subset of Operations. What is made worse is the strong influence of Fred W Taylor and Milton Friedman on the degree. Why would an MBA-educated CEO invest money in educating people with (to quote the lyrics of Sixteen Tons) “minds that are weak and backs that are strong”? Why would acolytes of that quasi-religion, Freidmanism, consider lifelong learning to be in the best interests of the organisation, its people and the communities in which they live if they are continually chanting the mantra, “maximise shareholder value” and looking for lower labour costs? You only have to look at the long-term decline of once-great companies like GM or Ford to see what Friedmanism does over time.

Lean has gradually moved from the Toolbox to the “softer” bits of Toyota’s leadership philosophy, for example, the emphasis on coaching using A3 as a great framework for dialogue. But does it make sense to expect managers and supervisors to be great coaches if they were never taught and encouraged to do this? We should heed the example of the Jesuits and their claim, “Give me the boy until he is seven and I will show you the man”. Does it not make sense to teach the “soft” bits of Lean to young people when they are around 16 before they enter the workplace? They could then follow your advice and choose organisations they can see are serious about Lean.

We wholeheartedly applaud your Value Chain Management leadership!

Phil Wilson,
Global Managing Director

The Association of Value Chain Organizations
aka The BreakPoint Consortium Blockchain community

Bill, thanks for your comments I’m glad you enjoyed the post. It is amazing how the same issues and resistance are found just about every where.

Perry, thanks for your comments. You make a very important observation that executives who can’t get on board with lean usually leave on their own. We almost never had to fire the concrete heads. In fact it was to our advantage to help them find a job with one of our competitors to keep them from becoming lean.