Evolving Excellence

The Independence of the French

2012-02-06T11:08:41-08:00

A recent Wall Street Journal article on French parenting methods has been rattling around in my noggin for a week so I've got to do something about it to free up some aging neurons. Yes it is bizarre, especially since I shouldn't relate - my "kids" are named "spontaneity" and "early retirement." Because of that I'm smart enough not to wade into a French vs U.S. parenting style debate - I know every situation is unique, every kid is unique, and it is far harder than I can imagine. But so be it, there were a couple interesting points in the article that could be applied to lean leadership. At least obliquely, so please bear with me.

The primary gist of the article is that French kids are far better behaved than U.S. kids.

Bean [author's U.S. kid] would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks. Our strategy was to finish the meal quickly.

I started noticing that the French families around us didn't look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Though by that time I'd lived in France for a few years, I couldn't explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I realized it wasn't just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I'd clocked at French playgrounds, I'd never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn't my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn't their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?

So why is that? The author proposed two points that were of interest to me. The first is independence.

When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids' spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.

The French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

This explains something that has bugged me for years - the concept of "boredom." All kinds of people around me seem to get bored, regardless of whether they are highly-educated or not, industrious or not, surrounded by friends and family or not. Turn off the TV for five minutes and they go nuts. I don't get it - I can't remember the last time I was bored. Put me in a room with white walls and I can entertain myself with my thoughts and ideas for days. Hmmm... maybe those should be padded white walls?

In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one's child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.

But I grew up in Peru in the middle of a military dictatorship - kids didn't really venture out much. There were only three TV stations, in Spanish. We had to learn how to entertain ourselves. Perhaps this is a vital skill?

And this is where the first concept of self-sufficiency ties in with the second: education vs. discipline.

The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. "Ah, you mean how do we educate them?" they asked. "Discipline," I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas "educating" (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.

One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don't pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat.

I don't want to imply that organizations and leaders and people are like parents and kids, but there is perhaps a lesson.

Discipline or education? When you go on your gemba walks are you looking for issues to resolve, perhaps by edict, or are you looking to mentor and coach and educate?

Are you grooming a set of managers dependent on you for leadership and decisions, or are you creating a new crop of independent thinking and decisionmaking leaders?

A Few Observations

2012-02-01T21:48:10-08:00

by BILL WADDELL

A curious observation on the Apple article

Kevin covered the New York Times Apple article quite well, so I won't repeat. I had to point out, however, the curious incongruity between the Dow Corning exec who said they had to make the glass in China, rather than in their plant in Kentucky because " We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas." Makes sense. Somehow that logic has eluded the Chinaphiles at Apple who can't seem to hang a $$$ on the 35 days and, as a result, pay to have that same glass shipped by slow boat back to the USA embedded in their products.

Also, I appreciate Kevin making the disclaimer that he owns the whole Apple line-up. Good idea for us to disclose any personal interest we have in the companies we mention in EE, so I will do the same: I own nothing made by Apple. The thought of sending a nickel earned from my work with lean companies to those guys - even a single iTunes download - is abhorrent to me.

The Outsider, not Insider Trading is Killing Us

The President forcefully asserted his expectation that Congress pass a bill banning insider trading among the distinguished gentlemen and gentlewomen leading us, and that honored group was only too happy to join him on such lofty moral ground. We might want to be more concerned about what they are doing right out in the open light of day.

For the last few decades Congress - with rare but total bipartisan support - has passed a stream of bills fueling the housing boom, most notably their near unanimous support for Fannie and Freedy to keep the boom well energized. They have also been all for deregulating the financial sector, providing tax breaks to oil companies and investing taxpayer money in fostering innovation. At the same time they went along with an endless stream of regulations and trade agreements crushing manufacturing with an unbearable burden, going along with the theory that it was a thing of the past - better done in China.

Perhaps it is nothing - you can be the judge of that - but this is the wealthiest Congress in history, and where they put the almost $2 billion they have to invest in recent years:

A coincidence that they put 93% of their money into the economic activities in which they have a personal stake, and sit idly by while the sectors in which they have no stake go to hell in a hand cart?

The 'All other' includes a hefty chunk of oil & gas, and computer/Internet.

You might want to spend a little time bouncing around OpenSecrets.org, the source of this data. It is always good to know who bought and paid for your representaives in Washington.

By the way, what group is Barrack Obama's leading financial backer? Unions? Environmentalists? Not even close. The correct answer is Wall Street.

Another Great Article (and not just because they quoted me, although I may be biased)

Inc Magazine published a pieceby Eric Markowitz about the benefits of re-shoring manufacturing, citing a interesting apparel company called American Giant. Their gig: "At American Giant, we eliminate all the unnecessary layers of traditional selling and marketing: big advertising budgets, fancy retail stores, expensive wholesale partners. That leaves us room to bring American Made craftsmanship to you at a great value, made here. So what’s the downside? We ask you to tolerate purchasing on our website before actually putting your hands on the garment. That’s why we offer free shipping both ways. If you are not 100% satisfied, send your product back and we’ll refund the total price."

In the article, "Exposing the Myths about American Manufacturing", American Giant suggests that it is a matter of time before cloting goes the way of books, videos and music and becomes primarily an Internet based market without the waste and cost of the middle men. They cite Zara (a company we have mentioned often) as a model for the direction retailing is going, and take it a step further.

Gotta love Margaret Thatcher

It is often difficult to find something new to write about in Evolving Excellence. The insanity of the Wall Street driven multi-nationals and thei off-shore foibles, success stories among many small and mid-sized domestic manufacturers, nonsense from government that would be humorous if it were not so destructive to so many hard working people ... how many different wasy can we comment on the same things.

And then I came across a great quote from the iron lady: "Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story."

It Takes the Patience of Saints

2012-01-31T21:02:18-08:00

by BILL WADDELL

If ever a man deserves sainthood it is John Vicklund of Impact Washington - the MEP out there. By way of background, the governor - Christine Gregoire - has gone all in on lean. She has reduced the number of government agencies and departments, has everyone engaged in value stream mapping and has made lean mandatory for the whole state government. So far, so good - in fact, so far, great.

Someone came up with the idea that an executive order from the governor was not good enough. All of leadership should stand in support, hence House Bill 2138 Maximizing the Use of Lean Strategies in State Government.

A hearing was held a couple of weeks back so the august members of the Washington State Legislature could investigate the matter before deciding whether to support it. If you have a little better than a half hour and need some comic/tragic relief you can view the hearing. Settle in for a clown parade the Ringling Brothers would envy.

First up, John explains lean in layman's terms to the committee, citing a value stream mapping exercise that had recently been conducted including state employees from several agencies aimed at rooting out all of the redundancy and needless waste and delay facing small businesses when they have to deal with the state. Then the comedy begins.

First up is a career political hack by the name of Gary Alexander. Concerning all of the waste, redundancy and delay facing small business, he says, "we have been knowing this for three decades, so why do we need a new process?" I would have come unglued and said something like, "Precisely because you do-nothing, pin-headed morons have known about it for three decades and have done jack squat about it." John, however, after pausing for a moment clearly trying to figure out how to formulate a non-offensive response to such an inane question, goes on to do just that. How he maintained his composure in the face of such idiocy I cannot possibly imagine.

Next out of the chute is a lawyer named Arthur West from some outfit called the Northwest Poverty Law Center. After qualifying himself with the acknowledgment that he knows nothing about lean, and has not bothered to take the time to learn the first thing about lean, he launches into a tirade about the ineffectiveness of it, declaring that improvement can only come from slashing headcount. He ends with the proclamation that lean is the purview of condo-living, brie eating, chardonnay sipping consultants who do nothing but toss buzz words about.

For Crissakes, Kevin is a brie-eating chardonnay sipper, but I am a midwestern wings and beer guy. Brie and chardonnay are left coast things - not lean things. I even had to look up how to spell chardonnay to write this post. The real issue is why this guy was allowed to speak at all. In any other forum in which you begin by announcing that you know absolutely nothing about the topic at hand and haven't spent a minute trying to learn, you are promptly told to shut up and quit wasting everyone's time. Not here, of course, where we see democracy in action.

It doesn't end there, however. Another blowhard named representative Overstreet weighs in with the observation that lean may well work in the private sector because the profit motive creates an incentive to improve, but for the life of him he can't see why anyone in state government should want to improve. Through it all, long after I would have reached the limits of my professional vocabulary and arrived at the point at which I could not respond to any of these guys without dropping an f-bomb, John maintains his composure, although it is painful to watch him struggle to do so.

One sane voice on the panel, Representative Miloscia who is the sponsor of the bill, tries in vain to put in a plug for some funding for leadership training for the various state agency department heads, but his peers will have none of it. No doubt every nickel they could sweep up in the state treasury has been invested in pork and stuffed into every barrel they can find - none left for leadership training.

To John's great relief, the cavalry finally arrives in the form of Wendy Korthuis-Smith from the governor's office who politely informs the 'idiots on parade' that they really don't need their money. The governor has gone begging, hat in hand, and lean outfits around the state such as Boeing and the Seattle Children's Hospital have volunteered experts to do the training. The governor just thought it would be nice if the the state employees could see that the representatives stood with the governor for the long haul in supporting the cultural change lean represents.

With that, the reps decided that, so long as no one was spending any money they guessed lean was OK by them. And with that rousing support they all went home ... for a well deserved brie and chardonnay refreshment break after another tough day dealing with the affairs of state no doubt.

Lean Chickens 1 Fat Lions 0

2012-01-31T18:52:51-08:00

by BILL WADDELL

So .... Golden Bear Ltd gets the contract to produce the official mascot for the 2012 British Olymic Team, and decides labor costs - excuse me, labour costs - are way too high in England to make them there. So they make them in China and, as a result of 26p per hour Chinese labor is able to sell this thing for $20 (12.99 pounds).

Meanwhile, West Paw Design in Montana makes something called a Spring Chicken - 2" bigger and filled with recycled material (instead of God knows what Golden Bear's Chinese friends put in the Lion), pays something like $15 an hour and sells it for $14. West Paw is a profitable, rapidly growing, enterprise.

Maybe the difference is that British accountants are mostly a serious, professional bunch who would not be caught dead working without a suit and tie, and just maybe those ties are choking the flow of oxygen to their brains, while the last West Paw accountant I saw was wearing blue jeans and a sweat shirt to work.

Maybe the problem is that Golden Bear has to factor the cost of their "Hong Kong office which, co-ordinates production and oversees quality in the manufacture of product.", while West Paw "coordinates production and oversees quality" through kanbans and hiring the best people Bozeman has to offer.

Or maybe the problem is that I have never seen Golden Bear - or any other British company for that matter - at the Lean Accounting Summit while West Paw sent a small army last year. West Paw seems to have 'labour' in a bit better perspective.

In all seriousness, there is no excuse for a manufacturer in England, the USA or anywhere else, making critical decisions based on traditional accounting.

Beyond Just Words - What Apple Could Do

2012-01-30T10:42:10-08:00

By Kevin Meyer

The New York Times created a deserved furor last week with their article describing how the U.S. supposedly can't compete with China on manufacturing - specifically the manufacturing of Apple products. As our fellow blogger Mark Graban points out in an excellent summary of that article, we shouldn't want to compete in that manner. The stories of worker abuse and managerial tyranny are appalling. Time magazine, in typical Time "hey please read us too" fashion, jumped on the bandwagon with an article on the human price of success. And Apple CEO Tim Cook tried to deflect the PR carnage with a long email describing all that Apple supposedly does.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a huge fan of Apple... products. I made the leap from PC to Mac a few years ago and haven't looked back. I also own an iPhone and iPad, a 27" Thunderbolt display, use iTunes - the whole kit and kaboodle. Those that haven't used Apple products for more than a few hours simply don't understand - the bloomin' stuff just works - and works like I want it to work - every time all the time. That has value, and is why I happily pay more for Apple products. Just this past weekend I watched a friend spend nearly an hour trying to get his Android phone to do what he wanted it to do. Wow. Really? There's a reason why less than 1% of Apple users leave Apple.

I've heard several people call Tim Cook the world's greatest supply chain executive. Sorry, I've never bought that. Tim Cook executed a traditional "chase cheap labor" supply chain strategy in a great way. But in my book that's not excellence - that's being the shining star of lemmings - the golden sheep if you will. The China factory isn't necessarily a bad thing - one valid reason to have a factory overseas is to be closer to your customers, and there are a lot of potential customers in that part of the world. But as nearly a singular factory serving the whole world? With employees that are abused? Sorry, no dice.

Apple, and Tim Cook, has done some good things. They do audit their supplier's factories more than most companies. They are taking some strong workers rights positions in their industry. They are opening their kimono and exposing more of their dirty laundry.

Apple has $96 billion in the bank - think of what they could do. More than just words and policy statements and such.

They could significantly increase the wages of their employees in China - even if they doubled their wages Apple would still have record profits. But that could actually cause more harm than good. Many workers simply want to earn enough to eventually go back to their home town or help their remote families. Some social destabilization dynamics need to be understood.

However consider this, Mr. Cook:

How about immediately hiring and sending an Apple observer into every plant, perhaps every line in every plant, full time. That way Foxconn wouldn't be able to shift workers from one line to another to hide abuses before audits occurred. How much would that cost? A million or two a year? Put Foxconn on notice that this is not acceptable, with milestones that could transfer manufacturing elsewhere. Difficult? Sure. Ethical business often is.

How about publicly saying (words...) that chasing low cost labor is not a long-term "manufacturing" option and then back it up by sinking a billion or two into developing truly innovative manufacturing methods and systems. Imagine what could happen if the same level of design prowess that was applied to product design was applied to manufacturing design. Perhaps Apple could become the next Toyota - instead of just another cheap labor chaser lemming.

I could go on - and I'm sure there are lots of other ideas out there. The bottom line is that thanks to its success - built on the backs of abused workers - Apple has the unique opportunity to change a global dynamic. But that will take more than just words.

As my friend Shrikant Kalegaonkar tweeted this morning, the world is changing. Voice of the customer now extends beyond products, and now includes the process for making the product. As an Apple customer - and also a shareholder - I care about Apple's financial performance. I want it to do well so it can return value to me in terms of new products and direct shareholder gains. I don't have a problem with wealth being created and distributed commensurate with individual effectiveness. But I also have a conscience, and increasingly I hate battling my conscience when using my Apple products. I bet many Apple customers are feeling the same way. That's dangerous for any company, and especially one like Apple which claims to embrace people.

So imagine. Imagine what would happen if Apple took the high road, then backed up the words with serious, solid, perhaps expensive action. Action that would change a global dynamic, showing that it is possible to be very profitable, very global, and very human-centered. $96 billion gives Apple the ability to do something truly incredible.

In addition to the actual improvement of the global condition, I bet a lot of folks would be impressed with the company - and would be inclined to buy its products.