You may find the following papers helpful in your exploration of lean culture and organizational development.
Action Learning: Cycles of Learning are the Key to Developing a Culture of Continuous Improvement
The Honda Way: A Visit to Marysville
Lean Culture and Leadership Factors – Report
I recently solicited the opinions of lean implementers regarding the progress they have made and the importance of what I felt were key factors when implementing lean culture or management. The individuals who responded were either those who read my own blog, those who participate on the NWLean Yahoo discussion forum, or members of the Lean/Six Sigma LinkedIn forum. It is safe to say that all of these individuals are engaged in the process of implementing lean, either as an internal change agent or an external consultant. A total of 82 individuals completed the survey.
Lean Culture and Leadership Survey
For those who would like to examine all of the responses to the survey, this file is the full output of the data from the survey of lean practitioners.
Whole System Architecture
Most of the writing on lean manufacturing, lean culture or lean leadership is focused on methods for improving the flow of the work. This focus is primarily tactical, focused on exactly how inventory moves from one place to another (JIT), or on how orderly the work place is (5S), or on how problems are solved quickly on the shop floor (PDCA), or on other techniques. They are all good and useful. They are necessary but not sufficient. They fail to examine the big picture of how work is organized and how organizations have been designed. Whole-System Architecture takes the practice of socio-technical systems and applies it to creating the whole-system of lean organization.
Lean Teams:
To compete in today’s world of high speed processes, Six Sigma quality and continuous innovation, hierarchies have been crushed and the horizontal process rules. Managing with a focus on the horizontal flow of the core work process, highly empowered and effective teams must take responsibility for their work process. Here is a quick guide to developing effective teams that manage their process and business performance.
Organization Life Cycles:
This paper is an excerpt from Mr. Miller’s book, Barbarians to Bureaucrats and describes the rise and fall of civilizations, corporations and the leadership styles that are the cause.
An Executive Coaching Framework:
The purpose of this paper is to share a few ideas regarding the goals, approaches and ways to think about the process of executive coaching. Keep in mind that all executive coaching is designed to meet the specific needs of the client, and those needs may vary greatly.
The New Capitalism of the New Entrepreneur:
To succeed in the new economy requires a new understanding of capital, assets and liabilities. In what now seems like the ancient days of capitalism, capital was money. But the founders of Dell, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and others started with no financial capital. They had something else. This paper presents a model of the five forms of capital that make a difference today.
PowerPoint Presentations
Life cycles of Culture and Leadership – Barbarians to Bureaucrats
This, of course, is from my Barbarians to Bureaucrats book. And, from a future book on Sustainable Wealth.
These slides describe some of what I feel are the important characteristics of lean culture. As an introductory presentation, this is not intended to be complete. A summary and some thoughts on implementation process.
(the file was too big for uploading as one file)
interesting and timely reading for me. We are trying to get LEAN team organized for internal process flows for software implementation for our clients