Ford has come an incredibly long way in time since Bill Ford Jr. courageously stepped aside to bring in lean thinker Alan Mulally.

Lately, they’ve been hampered by the embarrassing problems in relaunching the Lincoln brand through the MKZ. But, in the face of these problems, they are doing their best to reflect and make systematic improvements to prevent these problems in the future, as Automotive News reported.

The old behavior? Beat up the suppliers, and beat up any of the managers who allowed the suppliers to fail in the first place. Tell the dealers to stop complaining because they are lucky to have the Blue Oval anyway.

The new Ford? When you screw up, admit it. Then, reflect on why. Then, fix it.

The industry has been going through many supplier problems lately. During the downturn in the industry, a lot of capacity was taken offline, both physical capacity and human capacity. As things have ramped up, it has put a strain on the supply base across the industry.

Joe Hinrichs, new President of Ford North America:

Hinrichs admitted that the frenetic pace of new- and redesigned-model launches during the past two years strained Ford and its suppliers as they were recovering from the recession. Because the rapid pace of launches will continue, Ford and its suppliers have to be prepared, he said.

To solve this issue, they are putting more resources in place closer to the point of activity, at the suppliers, to help both identify issues earlier and help resolve them. That’s the “what” of the solution. The “how” will matter greatly. Will they put in place people who act collaboratively with suppliers, and processes to enable issues to be surfaced without retribution, or are they just an earlier bat to the side of the head of the supplier? I hope the former, but execution will matter.

Another root cause of their problems relates to product complexity, where offering more choices to customers goes beyond paint color and selecting what stereo interface you receive, there are more combinations of components that affects fit and finish and assembly processes that they can’t test them all. As a result, they are trying to use more 3D modeling to identify such issues earlier in the process.

Ford has come a long way. Rarely has that change been more dependent on one person: Alan Mulally. Many, many people did the work, but he established a new culture for Ford. The real test: he has put in place steps that lead to his retirement. Will the new Ford culture continue to grow, or will it quickly revert after his departure? Only time will tell.

 

This post was previously shared on the Lean Learning Center’s blog page.

So many teams that I coach, assess, observe, and otherwise engage in are looking for breakthrough results. That makes sense, right? Desperate times call for desperate measures (and we seem to keep being reminded that these are desperate times). And if I’m going to work on something, I might as well make it something really worthwhile, something big. And so we look for innovative, unique, breakthrough improvements and overlook seemingly mundane, simple ones.

Here’s how simple it can be.

A few weeks ago, I was in Derby , England, at Pride Park, home of the Derby County Rams. While in a conference room overlooking the football pitch (or soccer field, for Americans), I watched one of the groundskeepers painstakingly but quickly laying out orange cones very precisely on both ends. Once I saw what he was doing, it was so simple yet effective.

How do I cover a large, open field with fertilizer without missing spots or overspreading, in either case providing a far-from-perfect product? The evenly spaced cones gave him a simple target to aim for, allowing for the perfect distribution of fertilizer and an error-free result. The investment? Putting out and picking up cones each time.

Here’s why we overlook such simple solutions. We want to maximize ROI, or Return On Investment. So we start by sorting out our problems for the Return. Once we determine the return, we then see if it meets the Investment threshold. So we aren’t sorting ideas based on ROI. Sometimes the best way to maximize Return on Investment is not to look for the high returns but to look for the low investments. Keep it Simple…well, you know the rest.

Reflection: what do you do in your organization to encourage the seemingly small investments?

 

Although I’m a bit behind on many things, The Lean Edge asked a question that I’m just now getting around to answering. Is highlighting problems stressful and increased pressure on workers?

There is a major difference between tension and stress, and this difference when not understood causes tremendous problems. Leaders trying to create tension end up creating stress, and leaders trying to avoid creating stress end up eliminating healthy.

Stress is knowing that you’re not where you’re supposed to be, and not knowing what to do about it.

Tension is understanding the gap with a clear view of current reality, a vision of the ideal state, and action to close the gap.

Both put pressure on you, but one is usually manifested in physiological damage while the other creates focus and action. You decide which you’d rather have. But the line between the two is quite narrow, and it only takes a few off-hand comments to generate stress. There are plenty of leaders out there who purposely create stress, but most honestly do it by accident. They do intend to put pressure on the organization, but not necessarily through stress.

The role of tension has 3 core components. First, we must help people clearly see current reality for what it is, and understand why it is. Highlighting problems is part of that clear understanding of current reality. Second, we must define a better state, an ideal state, something that gives them direction to go forward in. This isn’t just about a result, but how things will be different. Third, we need action to start to close the gap. Not necessarily a grand plan that covers everything, but to start moving along the intended vector.

What do you do in order to create tension? And how can you tell when you’ve inadvertently created stress?

You can see other answers to this question on The Lean Edge.

 

In the last installment of my Industry Week column, Lessons from the Road, I talked about waste elimination. In it, I also explained that the commonly used phrase “do more with less” is often perceived about being about the “less” when I believe truly lean organizations focus on the “more.” But how do we do that?

In this column, The More of Do More with Less, I share at least some thoughts on what it means to focus on the more. Here is an excerpt:

1. Improve the customer interaction. So much strategic attention is focused on what product or service organizations provide that far too little attention is paid to how the customer gets access to it. The adage of “build a better mousetrap and they will beat a path to your door” assumes you haven’t already provided that path and paved it with lights and signs.

I was recently asked during a speech what the next area of focus of lean would be, and I believe one major opportunity is dramatic improvement of how customers interact with the supplier or vendor. Improving the actual interface, digital or otherwise, can have a great impact on both the real and perceived value received.

Amazon.com is a great example of this with its 1-Click Ordering. How much easier is it to buy product from this source than most other websites? First, of course, you have to have the right product at the right price. But once the customer is ready to buy, it certainly helps to make that experience as easy as possible.

You can read the rest of the column here.

 

Today I am speaking to the pharmaceutical industry at the ISPE conference. My topic is on the 5 leadership moves for lean from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean. Like many of my presentations, I don’t use many slides but tend to tell a lot of supporting stories.

 

Tuesday I was the featured speaker at Morris Midwest‘s Morris Madness customer open house. Morris features Okuma and Tsugami machine tools. Although many of the slides won’t mean much without the words that go with them, here is my presentation.

The show was well done. It was almost like a mini-IMTS. Here’s a picture of a pint-sized lathe from Tsugami.

 

My latest IndustryWeek Lessons from the Road column has been released. This month’s topic is hopefully a fresh look at an old lean topic: waste elimination. Despite the many definitions to the contrary, many of you know that my view is that lean is not “all about” waste elimination. But it’s still important, and so let’s get it right.

Here’s an excerpt from Eliminate Waste with Purpose:

My perspective is that the words “do more” are what’s core to lean: more value for the customer, more capacity to deliver that value and more capability in the organization. It’s not about less fat; it’s about more muscle. That’s how you build an organization capable of controlling its own destiny.

Here are the 3 suggestions:

1. Make sure waste is converted into value

2. Use the language as a lens

3. Have a system…any system

You can read the full column here. I would appreciate your thoughts. What other advice do you have to make waste elimination more effective?

You can see my other Lessons from the Roads columns here.

 

How are your meetings run?

If they are anything like many of the meetings I observe, they are filled with presentation of pre-determined opinion, sharing from participants of more pre-determined opinion, and then a little time left at the end for consideration and decision-making.

That might be fine for something like whether to run overtime through the weekend, or what price to offer a key customer. But is it really how we want to be making critical and strategic decisions?

Imagine if you told people how much time you wanted them to put into thinking about and considering a decision. You can guess the response, whether spoken or not, would be wondering why you are being treated like a child. After all, you can manage your own time and your own mind, can’t you? Yet, too many important decisions get about as much mindshare as a lunch order.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and a strong lean thinker, has a solution. Check out how he ensures careful consideration, from a Fortune magazine profile:

Jeff Bezos likes to read. That’s a dog-bites-man revelation if ever there was one, considering that Bezos is the cerebral founder and chief executive of a $100 billion empire built on books. More revealing is that the Amazon CEO’s fondness for the written word drives one of his primary, and peculiar, tools for managing his company: Meetings of his “S-team” of senior executives begin with participants quietly absorbing the written word. Specifically, before any discussion begins, members of the team — including Bezos — consume six-page printed memos in total silence for as long as 30 minutes. (Yes, the e-ink purveyor prefers paper. Ironic, no?) They scribble notes in the margins while the authors of the memos wait for Bezos and his minions to finish reading.

Amazon (AMZN) executives call these documents “narratives,” and even Bezos realizes that for the uninitiated — and fans of the PowerPoint presentation — the process is a bit odd. “For new employees, it’s a strange initial experience,” he tells Fortune. “They’re just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.” Bezos says the act of communal reading guarantees the group’s undivided attention. Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. “Full sentences are harder to write,” he says. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

Now, consider that he is Jeff Bezos and if that’s how he wants to run things, its unlikely that someone will ignore him. But imagine the improved thought, consideration, and dialogue that goes into important decisions. Isn’t that worth the investment?

Reflection question: Are you willing to force process on people to ensure thoughtful consideration? Can you afford not to?

 

This post originally appeared on the blog at Lean Learning Center. 

I read plenty of disturbing statements about lean, but I read one recently that really caught my attention because it seemed to rip the core of lean out of lean, and then almost claim credit for putting it back in.

I was reading a copy of AME’s Target Magazine from my huge backlog pile of reading, and read Applying Lean Principles for Scientific Research: Embracing a new way of doing research at Sandia National Laboratories (Spring 2012). Here was the quote, from Sandia National Laboratories (full disclosure: we’ve trained some folks here):

“The S&T [Applied Science and Technology Maturation] Department chose to create its Lean S&T process by integrating the principles of lean and the scientific method.”

What?

I thought lean was all about the scientific method.

They go on to describe the scientific method quite well (and the rest of the article is quite good):

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

2. Formulation of a hypothesis to explain the phenomena.

3. Test the hypothesis and use it to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of the new observations.

4. Peer review of the results of experimental tests and the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly-performed experiments.

That sounds good to me. Lean is all about becoming scientists of how things work, although instead of trying to figure out how nanotechnology works or chemical bonding, we are more focused on understanding how organizations work – people, processes, and yes, technology too. But we gain that knowledge, that insight, through experimentation.

It’s not enough to have the tools. It’s essential to understand them, how they work, and why they work. As an example, Nobel Laureate and MIT Professor Robert Merton explained the world’s financial collapse this way:

“Finance is truly global; it doesn’t have meaningful borders. And, if you look at the financial crisis, one important element that senior management and their regulators really didn’t have was a rich enough, deep enough understanding of their tools.” (The Foundation and Future of Finance, MIT Sloan Magazine , Fall 2012)

I don’t care what your profession is, it is still about understanding cause and effect, whether it’s understanding how things work in financial decision making, or understanding what has the greatest impact for delivery time as a UPS truck driver, or figuring out what provides the most help to a guest as a receptionist. The scientific method applies to every job available.

Strong lean efforts make heavy use of experimentation. They continuously study the current state through observation. They formula understanding of cause and effect through anything from process mapping to fishbone diagrams. They generate solutions and test them, and test them again, and again, until they truly understand. And the share the learnings and make it as transparent as possible.

Regardless of whether you are doing massive changes through strategic planning, or micro-tweaks to how you handle your email inbox, the same basic premise applies. You are either going down an learning path, based on experimentation and the scientific method, or you are going down a knower path, where learning doesn’t happen. Every day, every change, every person, you must make the choice of which path to follow, regardless of the tool, method, or template you decide to employ.

Which will you be? A learner, or a knower?

 

I just love this idea: a Manufacturing Hall of Fame. Not only have these folks contributed more to American society than any baseball player (except Red Sox players of course), but we need to celebrate manufacturing and make it more attractive for the best and brightest. We could use more brilliant people going to manufacturing and perhaps a few less going to Wall Street.

I’ve highlighted IndustryWeek’s Hall of Fame classes before, particularly when Lean Learning Center co-founder and friend Dennis Pawley received the well-deserved recognition.

Like any class, there are individuals from many contributing areas. I don’t agree with every choice made, but think a few are really worth highlighting. There are those who contributed to manufacturing science, such as Nobel Prize for Chemistry-winner Robert Curl who co-discovered the buckyball which lead the way to nanotechnology, and Scott Crump, a pioneer of additive manufacturing.

There are also lean minds, such as Doc Hall whose books I read when there only were a couple of books on lean, and Art Byrne, a celebrated lean CEO from Wiremold.

And then there are the leaders of big industry, most notably, in my opinion, is Paul O’Neill, former CEO of Alcoa, who not only lead Alcoa in becoming a high performing organization, but also helped inject serious lean efforts into the healthcare field.

You can see the entire Manufacturing Hall of Fame Class of 2012 here. Also check out the Class of 2011 and Class of 2010. The only questions that remain are:

- Who did they miss?

and

- What will you do to earn a further spot on this list?

Find Doc Hall’s books below: