Lean Manager - Liker Jeffrey

• In fact, I strongly suggest,” he added with a long pause for emphasis, “that you personally visit your customer about every quality complaint.
• When you’re on one side of the mountain, it’s so hard to see how the valley looks on the other side.
• So I want a clear PDCA cycle.”   “Plan, do, check, act?”
• “Hey, when the glass is full, the water you pour in it just spills on the table. Let’s call it a day, shall we?”
• The trick is don’t try to do it all on your own. You must involve everybody, every day, if not, you’ll fail.”
• To understand the true nature of the issue. And also, of course, to develop relationships. See, there is a lot of anger in this industry,” Jenkinson remarked sourly. “I find anger the most counterproductive behavior. In fact, I’m convinced that at the root of every angry discussion, you’ll find a misunderstanding. 
• Do our products or services consistently solve the customers’ problems?   - Can our people solve their own problems to consistently ensure this?  
• “But the real surprise is that standards cannot be maintained without kaizen. All the firms I know attribute their execution difficulties to the fact that people simply won’t follow the rules or keep up standards. Fancy that! What a big surprise. Why should people follow rules? Why should they stick to the procedure, day in, day out, when local conditions make it close to impossible.
• You can force someone to do something, but you can’t force interest. You can’t force people to think, they’ve got to be interested—and that’s up to them.
• Certainly, the French moral outrage to having to comply to any standard was not going to help, he thought wryly. The notion that he could engage French workers in kaizen made him smirk faintly. It was, however, a fresh perspective. And Woods really seemed to believe it.
• true lean is not about applying lean tools to every process, but about developing a kaizen mindset in every employee. We fail to hear them because we don’t want to hear them. You can’t wake up someone who’s pretending to sleep!
• Continuous improvement and respect for people.” Continuous improvement breaks down into three basic principles:  
  1. Challenge: Having a long-term vision of the challenges one needs to face in order to realize one’s ambition—what we need to learn rather than what we want to do—and then having the spirit to face that challenge. To do so, we have to challenge ourselves every day to see if we are achieving our goals.  
  2. Kaizen: Good enough never is, no process can ever be thought perfect, so operations must be improved continuously, striving for innovation and evolution.  
  3. Genchi genbutsu: Going to the source to see the facts for oneself and make the right decisions, create consensus, and make sure goals are attained at the best possible speed.  
  “Respect for people is less known outside of Toyota, and essentially involves two defining principles:  
  1. Respect: Taking every stakeholder’s problems seriously, and making every effort to build mutual trust. Taking responsibility for other people reaching their objectives. Thought-provoking, I find. As a manager, I must take responsibility for my subordinates reaching the target I set for them.  
  2. Teamwork: Developing individuals through team problem solving. The idea is to develop and engage people through their contribution to team performance. Shop-floor teams, the whole site as team, and team Toyota at the outset.
• “Go and see is a management technique,” explained Jenkinson, “a technique with four clear dimensions.   “First it’s about developing judgment by testing hypotheses. Go and see is the only way to figure out whether we are right or whether we have misconceptions. The expenditure of the second press screw was a failure of go and see: you didn’t have enough judgment to know whether it was the right thing to do or whether they should do more work to clarify the problem first.   “Second, it’s about building consensus by getting people to agree on the problem before debating the solution. Most conflict I see in business involves managers arguing about solutions when they don’t agree on what the problem really is. As a result, the imposed solution pleases no one other than the one that championed it, and people resist implementation. If they don’t share a common view of the problem, why should they buy into the solution?   “Third, it’s about achieving goals at the desired speed by checking regularly where people are in their implementation and helping them if they run into difficulties. In this way, we can learn to link high-level goals with detailed shop-floor implementation and find out where the real difficulties are. And we develop better judgment about where and how to invest resources.   “Fourth, it’s about empowering people by involving them. Involving operators starts by sharing the company’s objectives with them and solving their vexing problems immediately. Middle managers’ involvement can be seen by how well they maintain the visual- management system. Very often, people in the organization get stuck by needing either an authorization or a small push that is easy for senior managers, but hard for them. Go and see is about thinking ‘What can I do to improve this workstation or unlock this situation?’
• When I walk into a plant, I have two questions in my mind:   - What could be done to improve profitability today?   - What needs to be done to grow the plant two years from now?
• “Good managers have a clear understanding of what makes the process tick, and hence can expend the least effort to keep the process running as best as can be. On the other hand, poor managers spend money and waste effort on the wrong conditions and end up with both poor performance and costly operations. Kaizen is the key to figuring out, by constantly trying and reflecting, which conditions can be managed with the highest payoff, and which don’t matter nearly as much. Solving a problem entails learning to replace a high-cost maintenance activity in the process by a low-cost one. There is no miracle: Work remains work. But we can learn to work smarter by managing the right conditions. With the right pressure point I can leverage the world.”
• This is the first aspect of the kaizen spirit: making normal conditions visual so that anyone can see abnormal situations, and figure out immediately who needs to solve what problem. This will not happen if you, in this room, are not determined to sustain it, every day. So problems first.   “The second aspect touches upon the rhythm of kaizen events. Are you doing enough? Are you involving enough people? My rule of thumb is that every operator should be part of a kaizen event at least once a year. 
• I want you to realize that, in this company, managing means improving. Status quo is not an option, because every process unravels over time, and the competition doesn’t stop. At the moment, I’m sure you feel that you are making exceptional efforts to turn around this plant. Please understand that I do recognize and value that. However, this is not what I seek. Your task is to reorganize your own jobs so that kaizen is the mainstay of what you do. Managing means improving.”
• “SMART,” chuckled Jenkinson. “Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-constrained, right? We can see how well this theory has worked for Alnext, yes?”