3/11/2009

Ordering Lean Team Management

Filed under: Corporate Culture, Lean Culture, Team Development — Larry Miller @ 11:01 am

Amazon and other online retailers do not yet have Lean Team Management available. They will soon. You can order a single copy from me until the link is available. When the link is available I will create a hyperlink everywhere the manual photo appears to take you to the location on Amazon.

However… I’ll make you a deal! The list price of the manual is $38.

Order copies of ten or more through me!

  • If you purchase ten or more copies I will fulfill that order for $28 each.
  • If you order 25 or more copies I will provide you with a complete set of Powerpoints and teaching notes/lesson plans for the entire manual for free. This is to make life easy for internal or external trainers and consultants who wish to use the manual to develop teams in their organizations.
  • If you order 100 or more copies (see it gets better and better) I will provide all of the above, plus I will provide a link to an online pre and post survey and will provide the results of those surveys free of charge. The online survey asks 40 questions concerning the culture of the organization, the functioning of teams, trust, scorekeeping, customer focus and other characteristics of lean organizations. The survey can be sorted by department, management/employee, etc.

If you have any questions about the above, email me at LMMiller@lmmiller.com.

8/7/2006

Lean Organization Requires Alignment of Social and Technical Systems

Filed under: Lean Culture, Lean Manufacturing, Learning Organization — Larry Miller @ 4:49 pm

Some years ago while speaking at one of Norman Bodek’s Productivity Conferences, Norman referred me to an article by UCLA professor Lou Davis. Norman thought that Lou Davis and I were talking about the same things, but from different perspectives.

(Norman and I have a lot in common. At about the same time we both sold our companies (his was Productivity Press, mine was Miller-Howard Consulting Group) and he went off to follow Budhist philosophy and I went off to find God on the oceans. Now we are both back at work and both with new books.)

The Lou Davis article was on Socio-Technical Systems (STS) design (I know the very name makes managers fall asleep!). The first self-managed team manufacturing plants, long preceding the arrival of the first Japanese transplants, were created using STS. Gains Topeka, the first of these plants served as a model, and Proctor & Gamble picked up the technique and converted every manufacturing plant using STS. They considered it such a competitive advantage that they would not allow visitors in their plants. Whole-system design (the term I prefer) is an up-to-date version of STS, incorporating our knowledge of lean.

At its heart, STS was a simple and under appreciated idea. Manufacturing plants (and offices) are designed primarily with the flow of materials, equipment, and safety in mind. They were not designed with the competence and motivation of people as a primary design criteria. The founders of STS (Fred Emery, Eric Trist) demonstrated you would get optimum performance if the plant was designed with both the technical and social systems in mind and was created in a way that aligned these systems.

The more experience one has with Lean manufacturing or organization, the more clear it is that lean is a system in which both human and technical systems have been aligned.

The following illustrates the social and technical systems that need to be designed and aligned to create a true lean culture in the organization. This diagram may not include everything, but it is a good start.

Alignment2

7/18/2006

Getting to Lean - Whole System Design

Filed under: Lean Culture, Lean Manufacturing, Learning Organization — Larry Miller @ 12:50 pm

Lean organizations are learning organizations, a culture, not a technique. How do you create that culture?

Some good number of years ago I received a call from Honda America Manufacturing. To my surprise, I learned that the first plant manager of the Marysville Plant bought my book American Spirit in the Tokyo Airport waiting to move to the United States and take up his duties. He read it on the plane and concluded that “if this is what Americans believe, we can succeed in the United States.” For a number of years it then served as the text for their course on the Honda Way, taught by the Executive Vice President, Scott Whitlock to all new managers.

I am not sure that my book reflected what Americans believed then, but this coincidence did give me the opportunity to visit Honda on several occasions and learn a good bit about how their system of work, management and organization worked. They were very frank in attributing much of their own system to the Toyota Production System. This system is now commonly referred to as Lean production, lean organization or lean culture.

The most important lesson of visiting Honda is that you cannot find the explanation for their excellence in any one technique. When I first visited there the U.S. was in a frenzy over Quality Circles and its devotees were certain that it was the key to Japanese success. They were wrong. Then statistical control charts were given great credit for Japanese success. Few could be found at Honda. A dozen other simplistic explanations have been given.

The truth is that Honda and Toyota are “whole-systems” and the sub-systems of the work flow, motivation and incentive systems, training systems, organization and management levels, improvement processes, and many other factors are all components of the “whole-system.” It is a culture and all cultures are complex.

At this same time my consultants and I were practicing socio-technical systems design, the method used to create the first self-managing team plants in the United States. We took this methodology and applied it to the design of organizational system that incorporated the lessons of Honda, Toyota, Federal Express, and other great companies.

I recently attempted to describe this process on one page, inspired by the Strategy Maps of Kaplan & Norton. This map includes the principles and of the New Capitalism in my recent book with the process of whole-system design.

I know that without a great deal of explanation it is likely not fully comprehensible. But, if you have a question about it, send an email or make a comment.

Cheers, LMM