“gemba walk” (lean thinking term) to go to the actual place where value is added + “walkabout” (Australian aborigine) a short period of wandering bush life engaged as an occasional interruption of regular work
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I’m reading Bob Emiliani’s series on REAL LEAN and am finding the books quite useful. I just read some chapters in Volume 2 related to how rare REAL LEAN is. Some of my favorite quotes from Chapter 8 “Know Your Competition”:
* There are a lot of easier ways to create wealth than Lean management, even though most end up creating a big mess.
* A central feature is the classification of management systems and managers into two types: zero-sum and non-zero-sum. Zero-sum means is win-lose - winners gain at the expense of losers. Zero-sum executives are usually wealth destroyers, even though it may not look like that.
* Lean, REAL Lean is a non-zero-sum management system intended to benefit all stakeholders. (This distinction reminds me a lot of what Dr. Deming was emphasizing in his later years, “win-win” - he said there was no “win-lose” - the other choice is actually “lose-lose”.)
* Neither the university nor the school they (executives) attended fifteen, twenty, or thirty years ago had a policy that warned of the risks of zero-sum thinking in business.
* If eighty percent or more of bosses are the zero-sum type, then the odds are against being able to put to use much of what the non-zero-sum boss taught you.
* Non-zero-sum bosses make strong impressions … because they exhibited many value-added behaviors such as fairness, trust, patience, consistency, could admit a mistake, supported their people, etc.
* People tend not to replicate the non-zero-sum boss. Instead, they replicate the zero-sum bosses because that is the way the herd thinks and acts.
* (In college) the organizational behavior professor did talk about the dangers of zero-sum thinking, but everybody knows that while organizational behavior is a very interesting course, it is kind-of irrelevant.
* There are three main courses to wealth creation in business:
1) Conventional management … a defensive posture, sellers’ market, company first, zero-sum (asymmetrical) system of management.
2) Lean management .. done correctly (quire rare)
3) Hybrid batch-and-queue/Lean … an undesirable middle ground that is common today
* Ninety-eight percent or more of companies are conventionally managed or managed in a hybrid fashion.
* Creating wealth from waste is not taught in college and is not well understood by top managers.
* In the end, large numbers of executives will not adopt Lean management until they view it as a superior approach to wealth creation compared to the CEO playbook.
I also found the diagram below quite helpful (from Chapter 9).
