Lean Quote: It's About The Journey and Sometimes It Starts With Failure

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Success is not just the crowning moment, the spiking of the ball in the end zone or the raising of the flag on the summit. It is the whole process of reaching for a goal and, sometimes, it begins with failure." — Erik Weihenmayer; blind climber, motivational speaker, author

Ever hear of Erik Weihenmyer? Despite losing his vision at the age of 13, Erik Weihenmayer has become one of the celebrated and accomplished athletes in the world. On May 25, 2001, Erik reached the top of Everest and stood at 29,035 feet. He was the first blind person to summit Everest. At the age of 34, Erik became one of less than 100 individuals to climb all of the Seven Summits - the highest peaks on each of the seven continents. He completed this incredible accomplishment on September 5, 2002 when he stood on top of Mt. Kosciusko in Australia. Pretty amazing, don’t you think? We know for a fact that Erik “saw” the goal in his mind and in his heart – we know this because he is blind!

Erik is an example of not accepting failure or letting his challenges get the best of him. Failure is not shameful. On the contrary, it is part of the learning process.  It helps us discover things we couldn’t discover otherwise. For instance, we set a goal and we take steps to achieve the goal. If we reach the goal, we’ve succeeded. If we stopped taking the steps we needed to take to achieve the goal then we failed because we’re quitters, something to be ashamed of. If we take all of the necessary steps and still don’t achieve the goal then we failed because we couldn’t make it happen, and we feel ashamed. Most successes will be preceded by a series attempts that didn’t quite produce the results we were hoping for.

Here are some other examples of people who stayed the course and never gave up:



If we allow ourselves to become discouraged during the learning process we may give up right before we reach our goal. Anytime we learn from our efforts we are in the process of succeeding. Each lesson brings us closer to our intended result.



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Lean, What's in a Name From Those Who Label It

The Willington Companies is a local company that I interact with in our Lean Network. They are a family owned business in Connecticut using Lean manufacturing to stay competitive and grow their business. The Willington Companies have been a great example of Lean manufacturing in the last few years. They recently published a video from the employees at the company that  I feel really defines Lean very well.  




Do you think the Willington Companies get the true meaning of Lean?

Guest Post: What Could Be Easier? The 4 Step Deming Cycle

Today's guest post is brought to you by my friend and fellow blogger Christian Paulsen. Christian helps companies optimize performance. He is a Lean – TPM facilitator and adds value to organizations by driving continuous process improvements and bottom line cost savings. Christian is a Consultant who brings 20 years of manufacturing leadership experience and Lean Manufacturing expertise. He authors Lean Leadership and is a regular contributor to the Consumer Goods blog.


Plan - Do - Check - Act

That's not asking a lot, is it? You have just implemented a big change that should save your company a lot of time and money. A little follow-up to make sure everything is going as planned is common sense. What could be easier than to check to see how it's going, right?

Then why is it that so many leaders get caught in the Silly Cycle?

We have all been there. It seems that there are more and more demands placed on manufacturing plants every day. The same is true for other work places. Not only are today's leaders expected to do more with less. They are also expected to do it better, faster, and cheaper than last year. Sound familiar? It's no wonder that it's difficult to find time to properly plan and even harder to follow through on everything that crosses a leader's desk. But if you don't plan and you don't follow-up, all you do is Do, Do, and Do.

This really is not a new problem. While I believe that these are particularly tough times, leaders have always been challenged to do it better, faster, and cheaper.

In fact, the Plan - Do - Check - Act cycle goes back to the 1930's when Walter Shewhart developed PDCA. Dr. Edwards Deming made it famous with his work in the 1950's. While the PDCA is often called the Deming Cycle, he referred to it as the Shewhart cycle.

While it isn't easy to find the time, following the PDCA cycle will yield better results and sustained improvements. The basic steps are:

Plan: Define, measure, and analyze. Define the scope of the project. Assess the current state. Measure and benchmark so you know where you are starting. Analyze the root causes and consider your options.
Do: Implement your plan. Over communicate. Start with a pilot or test area. That way you can learn lessons from the implementation on a small-scale. No matter how easy your idea sounds, there will probably be some unexpected issues.
Check: Follow up on the results. See if the plan is being implemented as you expected. Get feedback to see how the plan can be improved.
Act: Standardize your improvements. Plan for Continuous Improvement. Build systems so that the improvements can be sustained.

Taking the time to plan, check, and act will pay dividends. You have already seen where skipping those steps takes you. You don't have time to solve everything today. Pick one and start there. What issues are you dealing with today that warrant a PDCA?



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Guest Post: How Does Your Hospital Give Excellent Service?

For today's guest post I am happy to have my friend Brian Buck talk about Lean in Healthcare. Brian is an internal Lean consultant at a hospital in Washington State. He blogs at http://improvewithme.com and can be found on Twitter as http://twitter.com/brianbuck.


A frequent driver for Lean in hospitals is to improve clinical outcomes to make diagnoses and treatments safer and more predictable which drives down costs for all stakeholders. For hospitals to be competitive, they must also improve their service as well. Providing great medical care is not enough if the service is poor or inconsistent.

I recently spoke with an executive at the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit who captured the typical patient experience fairly well. She said “Going to a hospital is like visiting a foreign country for patients and their families. Everybody speaks a different language. They can’t find their way around. They do not know anybody. The only thing that is recognizable is eating and going to the bathroom. With the food, we usually offer two choices that they would never pick on their own and then dictate what time they are to eat it. For the bathroom, we do not allow them to lock the door when they use it.”

There are some outstanding people who work in hospitals that provide great service and display a genuine care for the patients. The problem is this level of service is not consistent. A culture needs to be in place to ensure everybody in the hospital has an awareness of what the customer is experiencing so they can help them. Capacity needs to be created to ensure people are not overburdened which can negatively impact service.

A couple of years ago, a family member went to a local hospital and had service that was unacceptable to him. He frequently encountered nurses who either did not answer basic questions or took a very long time to respond. Doctors did not appear to talk to each other because of inconsistent messaging about the plan of care. Some people said he would be discharged on one day while others said it would be on a different day. He was already scared due to the medical condition, but the lack of service completely frustrated him and his wife. When he left after four days, his medical condition was taken care of but the service he received made him vow to never return there again.

Hospitals that pursue improvement to both clinical excellence and service excellence will attract more patients and retain those that need to return for other services. These kinds of improvements are critical for hospitals to survive.


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Guest Lean Quote: Root Causes Should Make Solutions Clear

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

This weeks Lean Quote is brought to you by my friend and fellow blogger Christian Paulsen. Christian helps companies optimize performance. He is a Lean – TPM facilitator and adds value to organizations by driving continuous process improvements and bottom line cost savings. Christian is a Consultant who brings 20 years of manufacturing leadership experience and Lean Manufacturing expertise. He authors Lean Leadership and is a regular contributor to the Consumer Goods blog.

"Determination of root causes should provide a clear and obvious understanding of the necessary solutions." — Jeffrey Liker and David Meier, The Toyota Way Field book

Proper analysis of an issue’s root causes could be the most crucial part of the problem solving process.

While this seems like an obvious statement, leaders and their teams fail to dig deep enough to find the root cause all too often. Others fail to follow-up on the countermeasures. These failures have consequences:

• Failure to identify root causes can lead to superficial solutions or Band-Aides that don’t work very long.  
• Erroneous root causes lead to ineffective ideas that don’t impact the issue at hand. 

Failure to follow-up on your countermeasures can lead to several issues as well. The countermeasures may not be working as intended or there could be unintended negative consequences. You could also be missing out on an opportunity to further improve your process if you don’t follow through in the spirit of Deming’s PDCA.

Finding the true root causes of an issue allows your team to identify true countermeasures that are in their control and are positively effective. Teams that are capable of identifying the true root causes of and issue are normally able to identify effective countermeasures for that issue.



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Guest Post: It’s Better Than Stuffing Your Ears With Wax

I am pleased to present a guest post by Daniel Markovitz. Dan is president of TimeBack Management, a consulting firm specializing in the application of lean concepts to individual and group work.

He is a faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute and teaches at the Stanford University Continuing Studies Program. He also teaches a class on A3 thinking at the Ohio State University’s Fisher School of Business.

He is the author of the forthcoming book, A Factory of One, to be published by Productivity Press in late 2011.

You can reach him at dan@timebackmanagement.com or via Twitter @timeback.
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According to Greek legend, Odysseus plugged his sailors’ ears with wax and tied himself to the mast of his ship so that he could listen to the song of the Sirens. Sometimes I think we need a similarly drastic approach to email (and attention) management. However, given that you’d have a hard time explaining to the HR department and OSHA why you’re asking your staff to shove beeswax in their ears, I thought you’d appreciate what I’ve done.

Within the lean community, Tim McMahon, Jon Miller, and I have been publicly exploring ways in which we can use a kanban to help us make our knowledge work visible and better manage its flow. (Jon’s posts are here, Tim’s are here, and mine are here.) Recently, I deployed my kanban as armor against the dreaded incursion of reflexive email use. Tim and I have both preached long and loud about the evils of squandering your day processing email. But I, at least, sometimes have feet of clay, and end up spending more time in my inbox than is healthy.

The question is, could I make a visual cue to keep me from grazing at the email trough? This is what I came up with:

In this picture of my kanban, all of my work-related tasks are written on pink post-it notes. Nothing special there.

However, you’ll notice three yellow post-it notes in the “To Do” section of the kanban. These are my “email production” signals. There are only three of them, meaning that I can only go into my email inbox to read or write new messages three times during the day. There are no time constraints: I can use these kanban cards anytime during the day, and I can spend as much time as is reasonable processing mail. But I only get three cracks at it.

Although it may seem like a waste of motion, when I’m ready to go into mail, I move a post-it into the “Doing” column, and when I’m done, I move it into the “Done” column. That reduces the number of email kanban cards in the “To Do” section, which is a powerful visual signal about the limits I’m placing on email use.

This technique has been very effective in keeping me focused on key tasks and projects. It’s also easier than tying myself to a mast or putting wax in my colleagues’ ears.



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Guest Post: Lean Sales and Marketing – Not without a new Toolset!

Joe Dager, owner of Business901 specializes in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. Joe has owned and operated companies involved in retail, manufacturing and professional services that include several turnarounds and growth companies. He has authored the books The Lean Marketing House, Marketing with A3 and Marketing with PDCA.


Think of all the changes and improvements in the manufacturing world in the last 20 years. We manufacture off floors cleaner than many tables that we eat off. You open a box, turn a key, or press a button and it works. Even the batteries are included! Most products manuals and operating instructions are never used. In fact, we seldom include them anymore. Our machines are so smart that they are completely intuitive to work for the entire population. Products have come a long way! More specifically quality has been an amazing success story and manufacturers have led the way.

What about sales and marketing? Is your sales and marketing that much better? Has it advanced at the same rate of improvement that your manufacturing has? Why not?

What are some of the improvement methods? In the marketplace, this is some of the good “marketing” ideas:

1. A recent blog headline summed said, Use Value-Added Sales to Boost Your Profit Margin. The blog post recommended extended warranties or guarantees, free shipping, consulting and more. I don’t know where value –added came into this. They are all delayed costs in my mind. I can go on but I felt the advice was like telling someone not to pay cash but put on your credit card. That way you don't have to pay for it, NOW!
2. Accelerate innovation and broaden our product line. We add more features and more products but seldom does that add or equate to more benefits that a customer wants. 
3. Create better websites, SEO, Social Media and send out more e-mails. There are so many things that we can do on the web that you need a marketing technologist, nice word for a geek to keep up. Many manufacturers are still struggling using the internet and more specifically social media in any other way besides a more sophisticated and sometime animated tool to deliver the old same marketing material, just in a little greener way. 

So I go back to my original question, do you think sales and marketing has improved at the same rate as manufacturing? If not, why not?

Most of us start our quality processes through the tool set of the methodology. I know that everyone likes to talk about Lean Culture and that tools are secondary and they are. But how many of us did not start there? The reason that sales and marketing has never become “Lean” is that they lack the proper tool set. I know the traditionalist Lean people will roll over with the comments forthcoming but bear with me.

With few exceptions, every time Lean is introduced to sales and marketing, it was through Value Stream Mapping with the sole purpose of removing waste in the process. Salespeople had every right to scream and ignore the conversation because all they were ever told to do was gather data. Than they were told what that data meant and as a result what they should stop doing. This resulted in neither an increase in sales nor an increase in value added time with the customer.

The toolset that is available is the one that has evolved from the Lean Software World of Agile and the world of Design Thinking. These worlds developed entirely from a different Lean format than the one found in U.S. manufacturing which is based on removing non-value added activities and waste. Lean Sales and Marketing needs to be based on customer value and PDCA (from a knowledge building platform). The funny thing is that both worlds of thought still reference the Toyota Production System and Lean Thinking by Womack and Jones as their basic guides.

The reason, I believe that these worlds are still so disconnected is how they think about customer value. Customer value cannot be an internal control point. It must be determined at the point of consumption. Only customer’s (customer defined as the user of the product) determine value and the non-customer when addressing markets. The funny thing is that Agile and Design Thinkers understand that value is not derived till the product is put into use and their efforts are not realized till that point. It puts an entirely different slant on looking at Lean and looking at the customer. Look at how the tools of Lean need to be presented to Sales and Marketing:

1. Don’t think Value Stream Mapping think Journey Mapping
2. Don’t think Future State think Concept Development
3. Don’t think Build and Deliver think Prototype and Test
4. Don’t think Product Benefits think Value in Use

If you want to bring sales and marketing into a continuous improvement mindset, change the tool set.

Related Posts:

The Role of PDCA in a Lean Sales and Marketing Cycle

Asking the right questions about Lean?

Where is the path in Continuous Improvement for Sales and Marketing?

Why does sales and marketing operate to a different quality standard?

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