Q #100: What is “lean thinking”?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

John Krafcik coined the term more than 20 years ago, based on his experiences as a quality engineer in the Toyota-GM NUMMI joint venture in California. His research led to the international best-seller, The Machine That Changed the World (1990), co-authored by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos.

According to Womack and Jones, lean thinking is based on these five principles:

1. “The critical starting point for lean thinking is value. Value can only be defined by the ultimate customer. And it’s only meaningful when expressed in terms of a specific product (a good or a service, and often both at once), which meets the customer’s needs at a specific price at a specific time.”

2. “Identifying the entire value stream for each product is the next step in lean thinking, a step which firms have rarely attempted but which almost always exposes enormous, indeed staggering, amounts of waste.

“The value stream is the set of all the specific actions required to bring a specific product through the critical management tasks of any business: the problem-solving task running from concept through detailed design and engineering to production launch, the information management task running from order-taking through detailed scheduling to delivery, and the physical transformation task proceeding from raw materials to a finished product in the hands of the customer.”

3. “Only after specifying value and mapping the stream can lean thinkers implement the third principle of making the remaining, value-creating steps flow. Such a shift often requires a fundamental shift in thinking for everyone involved, as functions and departments that once served as the categories for organizing work must give way to specific products; and a ‘batch and queue’ production mentality must get used to small lots produced in continuous flow. Interesting, ‘flow’ production was an even more valuable innovation of Henry Ford’s than his better-known “mass” production model.”

4. “As a result of the first three principles, lean enterprises can now make a revolutionary shift: instead of scheduling production to operate by a sales forecast, they can now simply make what the customer tells them to make. As Womack and Jones state, “You can let the customer pull the product from you as needed rather than pushing products, often unwanted, onto the customer.” In other words, no one upstream function or department should produce a good or service until the customer downstream asks for it.”

5. “After having implemented the prior lean principles, it ‘dawns on those involved that there is no end to the process of reducing effort, time, space, cost, and mistakes while offering a product which is ever more nearly what the customer actually wants,’ write Womack and Jones. ‘Suddenly perfection, the fifth and final principle, doesn’t seem like a crazy idea.’”

Here is a link to the Lean Enterprise Institute:

http://www.lean.org/

I highly recommend Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation (Revised and Updated Edition) co-authored by Womack and Jones as well Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, and Michael George’s Lean Six Sigma for Service: How to Use Lean Speed and Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and Transactions.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #99: How can I quickly improve the quality of my writing?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

Lynda Goldman is the author of How to Make a Million Dollar First Impression and You’re Hired. Now What? that will be available in October. In her latest email, she asks, “How often do you stare at a blank computer screen, trying to figure out what to say in a business memo, letter, or email message?” She notes that most people avoid writing because they are confused about what to write, and the result they want. Every business communication has a purpose. It can be to provide information, request action, or persuade someone to do something.

She suggests these five questions to ask and then answer to achieve immediate and significant improvement of one’s writing skills:

1. Who will read this? Analyze your audience and decide how much they know about this subject, and how much you should explain.

2. What is this correspondence about? Write a clear statement of why you are writing.

3. What information do they need? Explain the problem, situation or request, and give support or details as needed. For longer correspondence, group your ideas into sections.

4. What do I want to happen next? State an action. Tell the readers what you will do, or what you’d like them to do.

5. Does it connect with the reader? Check if your language is clear and concise, and if you have the right level of formality. Edit for tone and clarity, and check spelling and punctuation.

Goldman offers a wealth of resources at her Web site where you can sign up to receive her e-mail alerts:

http://www.lyndagoldmanink.com/

In Q&A #17, I offer a few suggestions of my own on how to improve communication skills. I also recommend these sources: William Zinnser’s On Writing Well, Stephen King’s On Writing, and William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #98: What are the greatest leadership challenges in today’s business world?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

Opinions about this vary, of course, but recent surveys of C-level executives suggest these:

1. Accommodating the needs and interests of employees and (especially) customers who are more independent and have more choices as well as more control over the consequences of the choices they make.

2. Getting more employees actively and productively engaged.

3. Creating more “customer evangelists.”

4. Coping with change that occurs faster now than ever before in a world that Thomas Friedman correctly describes as “hot, flat, and crowded.”

5. Surviving the current global economy.

In their recently published book, Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence, Philip Kotler and John Caslione offer excellent advice on how to respond to these and other leadership challenges.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob