I was just skimming / reading my dissertation (part of an effort to make some of the knowledge in it more accessible. That dissertations aren’t widely read is not a secret 😉

I was thinking / realizing how much my thinking and understanding has advanced in the 3.5 years since I wrote it and it is no longer a good reference for my current thinking. And then I realized I wish I would have read the paragraph below before writing about waste earlier this year. Because what I wrote 3.5 years ago gets to the point a lot clearer:

“In order to transform to a lean culture there needs to be a deeper understanding of lean principles beyond eliminating waste”.

The focus on value and removal of waste is the result of a technical framing of lean looking at the process with the purpose of solving problems to eliminate waste. Liker defines the philosophy behind lean as the Toyota Way consisting of 14 principles categorized into the 4P model of philosophy, process, people, and problem solving (Liker 2004). The foundational “philosophy” focuses on long term thinking; “process” is reflective of that the right process will produce the right results; “people” emphasizes that value is added to the organization by developing people and partners; and “problem solving” focuses on continuous improvement. Most organizations understanding of lean is at the process level with a technical viewpoint (Liker 2004). The technical lean tools are the countermeasures developed by Toyota to solve their unique problems in their environmental context (Spear and Bowen 1999; Liker 2004). From the technical view  of lean it is easy to conclude that it doesn’t matter whether “lean experts” or engineers doing the product development are solving the problems, as long as the problems are being solved. This has often resulted in implementation of technical lean tools achieving initial gains that were not continuously improved upon or sustained (Liker and Rother 2011; Liker and Franz 2011). This lack of sustainability led to a change in the reward criteria for the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence to add the criteria of creating a culture of continuous improvement as past winners, who had not embedded lean into their culture, had failed to maintain their gains[1]. In order to transform to a lean culture there needs to be a deeper understanding of lean principles beyond eliminating waste.

[1]Robert Miller, Executive Director of the Shingo Prize, interviewed on radiolean.com, July, 2010. “About 3 years ago we felt we needed deep reflection. After 19 or 20 years we went back and did a significant study of the organizations that had received the Shingo Prize to determine which ones had sustained the level of excellence that they demonstrated at the time they were evaluated and which ones had not…We were quite surprised, even disappointed that a large percentage of those organizations that had been recognized had not been able to keep up and not been able to move forward and in fact lost ground … We studied those companies and found that a very large percentage of those we had evaluated were experts at implementing tools of lean but had not deeply embedded them into their culture.”

Liker, J. K. (2004). The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles From the World’s Greatest Manufacturer. New York, NY, McGraw-Hill.

Liker, J. K. and J. K. Franz (2011). The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement: Linking Strategy and Operational Excellence to Achieve Superior Performance New York, McGraw-Hill.

Liker, J. and M. Rother. (2011). “Why Lean Programs Fail.”   Retrieved 2/28/2011, 2011, from http://www.lean.org/admin/km/documents/A4FF50A9-028A-49FD-BB1F-CB93D52E1878-Liker-Rother%20Article%20v3_5_CM.pdf.

Spear, S. and H. K. Bowen (1999). “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System.” Harvard Business Review 77(5): 97.