Book Review: Flow Engineering

Have you worked for or do you work for an organization that is growing exponentially. Our organizations are growing dramatically as it has become easier to expand operations globally either through acquisition or through addressing new markets. These fragmented segments and disconnected infrastructures can greatly impact radical transformation and business improvements. As the company grows waste and delay grow exponentially taxing the business more and more.

If you’re looking for a way to be able to chip away at this complexity turn to Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action. Written by Value Stream Mapping experts Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis, Flow Engineering provides a step-by-step guide for running fast-paced mapping workshops that rapidly build shared understanding. Based on foundations from Value Stream Mapping, cybernetics, and the Toyota Production System, Flow Engineering's lightweight and iterative practices build the value, clarity, and flow required for effective collaboration and collective action.

Flow Engineering is a series of collaborative mapping exercises designed to connect the dots between an unclear current state and a clear path to a target state. It’s an open, adaptive, and engaging series of practices that can take you from complexity to clarity, from friction to flow.

Using the five key maps to facilitate collaborative “flow conversations,” Pereira and Davis show how teams can surface tangled process dependencies, conflicting priorities, and unspoken assumptions that grind progress to a halt. The result? A clear roadmap owned by the people doing the work to accelerate innovation cycles, optimize workflows, and achieve more effective coordination.

The book is organized into 3 parts. The first being gaps that need to be bridged and why they have been a challenge for most organizations. The second part lays the foundation for flow engineering with the five mapping steps. The last part describes approaches to scaling and sustaining your progress with Flow Engineering beyond an initial pilot. Throughout the book the authors use a fictional example to help illustrate the practices of Flow Engineering. Each chapter summarizes key learning points for emphasis.

This book is for Lean practitioners familiar with the basics of value stream mapping and basic agile knowledge. Curious problem-solvers struggling to help their teams or organizations see the big picture will find benefit from the techniques in Flow Engineering. It’s easy to adapt and tailor to varied situations. It’s flexible enough to help teams of any skill level, and it’s robust enough to be used for ambitious process improvements or day-to-day problem-solving.

If you are looking to improve flow, explore more, or be inspired then consider reading Flow Engineering.

This book will be released May 14^th but you can preorder here: https://amzn.to/3QkTZhc

Note: The publisher IT Revolution sent me an advanced copy to review.

Book Review: The Mistakes That Make Us

We all make mistakes. That’s what makes us human but do we learn from them and how do they shape us to be who we are.

We all have a choice about how we react to our mistakes. We can ignore them and likely keep repeating or we can admit to them, think about what we expected to happen, and learn where we went wrong.

The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation written by Mark Graban dives into embracing and learning from mistakes and fostering a culture of learning and innovation.

I’ve known Mark for many years and this has been a passionate topic for a long time.  I follow him online especially the podcast series My Favorite Mistake which led to this book. He has authored many tremendous contributions regarding Lean and continuous improvement so when this came out it was on my must-read list.

The book is filled with relatable real life stories of many types of people in many different roles who have made mistakes and learned from them. He has organized them into 7 lessons. Each lesson overlaps and feeds into the next lesson.

Lesson 1 - Admit mistakes quickly and honestly. Coach, don't punish, those who report mistakes and use the knowledge you've gained to coach others so a mistake isn't repeated.

Lesson 2 - Be kind. Not the same as nice, kindness is less about forgiving and more about using mistakes as learning opportunities.

Lesson 3 - Prevent mistakes. As a lean student poke yoke is always in my mind. Once you learn use systems to prevent mistakes from reoccurring.

Lesson 4 - Help everyone speak up. This requires a culture change. But this really starts with those you lead.

Lesson 5 - Improve don't punish. Hiding rather than learning from mistakes out of fear is one of the biggest mistakes.

Lesson 6 - Iteration. In order to innovate and create something new you must iterate to see what works and doesn't work. Reminds me of the practice of coaching kata.

Lesson 7 - Cultivate forever. Don't try to emulate someone else. Use your desire to learn and coach up and down to drive through the organization.

In the book, you'll find practical guidance on adopting a positive mindset towards mistakes. It teaches you to acknowledge and appreciate them, working to prevent them while gaining knowledge from the ones that occur. Additionally, it emphasizes creating a safe environment to express mistakes and encourages responding constructively by emphasizing learning over punishment.

The Mistakes That Make Us is a must-read for anyone looking to create a stronger organization that produces better results, including lower turnover, more improvement and innovation, and better bottom-line performance. This book will inspire you to lead with kindness and humility and show you how learning from mistakes can make things right.

I really enjoyed learning from others’ mistakes and the positive lessons that came from them. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to change their perspective and their life for the better by cherishing the mistakes we make.

Note: The author, Mark Graban, provided an advance copy for the purpose of reviewing.

Book Review: The Seventh Power

All Northeast Lean Conference attendees received a copy of Kevin Hancock’s book, “The Seventh Power: One CEO's Journey Into the Business of Shared Leadership.” Kevin Hancock is the CEO of Hancock Lumber Company, one of the oldest and best know family businesses in America. Established in 1848, the company grows trees and manufactures lumber for global distribution. Hancock Lumber operates ten retail stores and three sawmills that are led by 460 employees. The company also grows trees on 12,000 acres of timberland in Southern Maine. Hancock Lumber is a multi-year recipient of the ‘Best Places to Work in Maine’ award.

In 2010, HE was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological disorder that makes speaking difficult. In 2012, he began traveling from his home in Casco, Maine to the remote Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. There, he encountered an entire community that did not feel fully heard. These two transformational events combined to help him realize that there are lots of ways to lose your voice in this world and that leaders historically have often done more to restrict the voices of others than to liberate them.

This epiphany set him on a journey stretching over 15,000 miles, from his hometown in Maine, to the Arizona desert, and eventually all the way to Kiev, Ukraine, on a quest to find a new set of leadership principles designed to disperse and localize power rather than collect it. The unexpected journey was a puzzle filled with clues about the nature of “power” and how it might be used more carefully and shared more broadly. These encounters ultimately blossomed into a series of insights as to how CEOs and other leaders might elegantly break down the planet’s entrenched, top-down governance model in favor of a new playbook for heightened human engagement, hallmarked by shared leadership, dispersed power, and respect for all voices.

Having found a piece of his own authentic voice, he wanted to help others do the same, and a lumber company in Maine became an unlikely platform where this could occur. The new goal: create a socially transformative work culture for the 21st century in which employee engagement soars because everyone feels authentically heard.

After hearing Kevin speak I knew this book would be good on several dimensions. It is a wonderful connection between a personal journey and the profound effect that journey has had on all aspects of leading and managing a complex organization. Kevin Hancock skillfully threads leadership lessons throughout the entire narrative of The Seventh Power.

A few of the most valuable leadership principles within the book include these ideas:

- Leading through listening is essential.

- Great people are everywhere.

- In nature, power is dispersed.

- Organizations exist to improve the lives of the people who belong to them.

Hancock offers a lot of terrific one liners to post on your desktop and remind yourself of higher thinking. Such as:

- "Seeking is the biggest step in finding." (page 43)

- "Proving others wrong rarely creates progress." (page 61)

- "Moving at nature's pace has regenerative powers." (page 72)

- "It's respect for the diversity of thought that creates unity." (page 126)

- "The power of princes and presidents pales in comparison to what all the world's strangers can do just by being nice to each other." (page 118)

- "Personal growth is an act of faith followed by action. (page 254)

The Seventh Power contains seven important lessons encapsulated in seven main chapters. These lessons include:

1. GREAT PEOPLE are everywhere.

2. CULTURE makes the difference.

3. CHANGE is created first from within.

4. LOCALIZE and shrink the center.

5. LISTEN for understanding, not judgment.

6. OVERREACHING has consequences.

7. BROADEN the mission.

These chapters need to be read in order to fully grasp the lessons being shared within the pages. The concepts being taught build sequentially upon each other.

Overall, while I love this book and highly recommend it to everyone. This book is a must read for managers and leaders, or anyone aspiring to be one. The Seventh Power would be a great reading selection to be discussed at a business retreat or a book club.

 

Book Review: The Lean Strategy

Lean goes beyond a set of tools to improve your business to change the way we think to unleash innovation, create a competitive advantage, and deliver sustainable growth. Four highly respected figures in the Lean world, Dr. Michael Balle, Daniel T. Jones, Jacques Chaize, and Orest J. Fiume, came together in 2017 to dispel common myths about Lean and explain the strategy. They coauthored The Lean Strategy as a guide for CEOs to develop an approach to deliver enduring customer value that will drive business sustainability for the foreseeable future. 

The Lean Strategy is not groundbreaking or revolutionary as it claims. The authors do not add anything to the idea of lean itself, but do take a stab at promoting its wide application. There is plenty of evidence presented that a lean strategy is beneficial to companies in manufacturing, that much is clear. However, in my mind the authors fail to demonstrate how lean can produce better results for “society at large.”

For me, there a couple key contributions to lean thinking presented in The Lean Strategy:

1. Different approach to decision-making: the switch from a traditional top-down approach, separating decision-making from implementation

A framework characterized by 4Fs:

Finding the next things the organization needs to do better, facing up to the inadequacies of the current system or the challenges for the future and measuring those and focusing on those and then, framing those challenges for all the teams in the business to come up with proposals for projects to improve them. Finally, out of all of that experimentation, you form new solutions.

2. Lean is fundamentally about changing leadership habits in both thinking and behavior.
3. We can’t solve problems by taking out the impacted people. People should be at the center of the solution.
4. Create a learning organization culture - it's all about gemba, training, teaching, learning, thinking, and practicing.

It is written in a repetitive, inefficient, confusing, and sometimes contradictory manner. In The Lean Strategy, the authors define “strategy” as what “sets the direction for the firm: what distinctive value proposition to the customer will give us a competitive advantage.” However, when reading the book I found two different descriptions of what a lean strategy is. On one hand, the authors have titled the book “The Lean Strategy” and put forward that Lean is a “new business strategy.” Then, several paragraphs later, they also propose that Lean is a way of thinking about strategy: “Lean strategy is about learning to compete.” This is followed by similar arguments elsewhere in the book such that: “Lean presents a fundamentally differ way to think about strategy” and “there is no such thing as a Lean company. There are only companies led by Lean thinkers.” So is Lean is a strategy unto itself, a framework for developing a specific strategy, or both.

Terms like “kaizen” and “gemba,” along with a myriad of alliterated acronyms, are used repeatedly throughout the book. If you’re not familiar with lean lingo, you may find yourself going back to the index. If you are familiar with lean and its history, then The Lean Strategy may be worth a read. The book is a breakdown of how companies over the last 25 years have applied lean to improve their bottom lines by eliminating wasteful processes.

This book can be a resource for leaders at all levels but best suited for anyone who has a desire to approach things in the right way.

 

 

Book Review: Everything I Know About Lean I Learned in First Grade

Everything I Know About Lean I Learned in First Grade written by Robert Martichenko is a not your typical lean book. It's written from the perspective of the author visiting his daughter's 1st grade class and discovering methods for teaching and managing the classroom that seem very similar to the Toyota Production System.

Adopting a Lean culture plays itself out in a variety of ways within this elementary school, but more important than the specific ways in which it manifests itself, are the principles behind it. The author’s writing style interweaves the experience of first grade for the first time with points of reflection on lean principles.

I’ve had a similar experience as the author visiting my own kids’ elementary schools. There are examples of 5S, standard work, visual controls, and many other systems. I could easily relate to the authors’ viewpoints.

Great concept to tell the Lean story. It’s a short, simple to read, and easily understood book. Good introduction to Lean concepts presented in an accessible and practical manner.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in Lean. If you are a practitioner there are good examples used as a reminder and if you are new to Lean this book illiterates the concepts well in familiar situations.

Book Review: The Resilient Leader

We’re all in a storm these days especially considering today’s contentious political, racial, and pandemic climates.  Building resilience in life isn’t as easy as it sounds, but with the right support, it might actually be simpler than you think. In The Resilient Leader, author Christine Perakis shares strategies you can use to navigate life and business. Christine tells her tale of surviving not one but two Category 5 hurricanes. But she does so by weaving leadership principles into her tale.

Christine Perakis has created seven resilience strategies that you can use to get through whatever your disruptive environment throws at you to create life and career invincibility and come through any challenge thriving.

In The Resilient Leader, she discusses:

• The 7 Barometers of Pandemic Preparedness for Small Businesses
• Barometer #1 – Create a float plan for success – one page strategic business plan
• Barometer #2 – “Keep on hand on the boat” – self-awareness, set the rules and lead by example
• Barometer #3 – Expedition planning and preparation allow for situational readiness – create systems to keep your team motivated
• Barometer #4 – Leadership vision – see possibilities of your situation, move forward as a leader
• Barometer #5 – Don’t go it alone – expand team capabilities
• Barometer #6 – Communication is critical – “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
• Barometer # 7 – Develop good judgement – practice good decision-making models
• The 3 Things Senior Leaders Must Do During a Crisis
• Create a new float plan, redefine your vision, and commit to deepening your relationships with people
• Creating a “Float Plan” For Dealing with Business Disruption
• Evaluating and Motivating Your Team During (and After) a Disaster
• How to Make Crucial Decisions Before It’s Too Late
• Creating a Communication Plan (both corporate and individual)

Life may not be smooth sailing, but with strategies to build strength, you can survive the storms to become invincible in any weather. It’s time to take control.

I would recommend this book to anyone along the journey of business improvement. The Resilient Leader is full of actionable wisdom from real life survival experience.

Free Bonus Materials from the Author

• Fillable Float Plan
• Marketing Barometer
• Mini-Audit Assessment Questions

Read a FREE excerpt from The Resilient Leader.

FREE Discussion Guide

Try using The Resilient Leader as part of your next training event, team meeting or book club! Our free discussion guide is the perfect companion to the book, and will help you get the most out of your event. Included are discussion points and questions that will help guide your team through this book. Download the guide now!