I’m excited to present to you this interview with noted teacher of lean management, author, and someone that brings sanity to the lean movement, Bob Emiliani. We’re grateful to Dr. Emiliani for taking time to share his thoughts with us today.

In this interview you’ll learn the following:

• What are the visible and not so visible hallmarks of Fake Lean versus Real Lean
• His thoughts on Lean beyond the manufacturing floor, including Lean Teaching and Lean Leadership.
• His advice for those just beginning their lean journey.

Enjoy the interview and please read more about Bob Emiliani after the article. And feel free to check out other lean leadership interviews.

Dr. Emiliani, thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to my audience?

I have been a professor of Lean management since 1999, teaching courses on Lean leadership and Lean supply chain, among others. Prior to that, I spent 15 years in the consumer products and aerospace industries in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain management. I held leadership positions in these three disciplines. I first learned about Toyota’s production system from Shingijutsu consultants when I was in manufacturing. The first kaizens I participated in were a revelation. That was summer of 1994. But, what interested me far more than Lean tools and process improvement was how people were led in an environment where process improvement flourishes.

It was easy to see a few major differences, but how many other differences were there? And, what were the details that make up those differences? So, I decided to focus on Lean leadership. My research for the last 20 years has resulted in the creation of several new and innovative ways to understand and practice Lean leadership. I am particularly proud of how I transformed Lean leadership from an art (behaviors) to a science (leadership processes). That’s a breakthrough. It makes Lean leadership accessible to anyone. The combination of my practice of Lean leadership in industry and my research has enabled me to answer many important questions that people have had about Lean leadership.

What first got you started on your lean journey? Was there a specific event that sparked your lifelong interest?

It started around 1991, when I began reading books and papers related to leadership, organizational behavior, and organizational development. I read these things because I recognized there were fundamental problems and severe disconnects related to how people were led. Then I read Masaaki Imai’s book Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success, and started to see that processes were very bad and in need of improvement.

Also, I was determined to not lead how my bosses led because it harmed people and was ineffective. It resulted in people who were focused on self-preservation and maintaining the status quo – and thus perpetuate bad processes rather than improve them. But, what really sparked my interest in Lean management was my first experience with kaizen. It drove me to want to improve the workplace from both leadership and process perspectives, to make things better for people.

It appears that you spend a good amount of time on the Respect for People principle and also on Lean leadership. If you were speaking to a hard-headed, very results-only focused executive, how would you communicate the importance of Respect for People to him/her?

Yes, I focused on the two things that everyone else ignored because they were consumed with Lean tools. That gives me a big head start. I was the first academic, informed by a lot of industry experience, to focus Lean leadership and the “Respect for People” principle. One of the first papers I wrote in 1998 was titled, “Lean Behaviors,” which explained why leaders have to be behaviorally consistent with the process improvement outcomes that they seek. Meaning, leaders cannot behave in wasteful ways and expect process improvement activities to function correctly and result in the elimination of waste, unevenness, and unreasonableness. It was a landmark paper and it won a best paper award. Since then, my work has examined the leadership beliefs that inform behaviors, and understanding leadership processes and how to improve them.

Leaders have been the intended audience for my work from the start. I try to reach hard-headed, results-only focused executives through my talks, training, books, videos, research papers, etc. It’s a tough audience to influence. They have 25 or more years of work experience and see business a certain way, and they have great confidence that is the best way for business to function. The fact is, most hard-headed, results-only focused executives are not interested in understanding and practicing the “Respect for People” principle. The 100-plus year history of progressive management has clearly shown this to be the case, and I have learned this directly from many years of training senior leaders. They cannot see “Respect for People” problems, so therefore the problems do not exist. Problems that do not exist don’t need to be understood and improved.

Executives like that are mostly a lost cause because Lean’s message to them is: “Just about everything you know is wrong.” That’s a non-starter. Lean’s actual message is: “You have wonderful and exciting new things to learn that will result in better outcomes for everyone.” Unfortunately, few executives receive the positive message, and they continue to harm to people as if it in their job description to do so. Yet, I still try to reach them through my writings, which are often perceived as provocative, and by other means. My purpose is to help leaders understand Real Lean so they can improve the lives and livelihoods of others.

You’ve published a series of books called “Real Lean”. Why the distinction of “Real”? Perhaps can you illustrate (show, not tell) what “fake” lean looks like and feels like?

Yes, it is a six volume series of pocket-books that describe the many remarkable details and nuances associated with Real Lean in contrast to Fake Lean. I defined Real Lean as the application of both the “Continuous Improvement” and “Respect for People” principles, while Fake Lean is the application of only the “Continuous Improvement” principle. This follows Toyota’s representation and that of other progressive management pioneers that preceded Toyota.

Fake Lean is easy to identify. It looks like this: Leaders who lay people off as a result on continuous improvement, blame people for errors, make zero-sum (win-lose) decisions, fail to eliminate non-Lean metrics, and bureaucratize Lean. It is easy to feel Fake Lean as well. It is oppressive, slow, and frustrating. It feels like working in an organization where appearances matter most, where good news is rewarded and bad news is punished, where kissing ass is more valued than recognizing and correcting problems, and where people cannot speak truth to power. This disrupts and blocks the flow of information, which in turn causes innumerable other problems. Adding Lean tools to an organization like that amounts to decorating the business solely to increase the stock price, executive pay, and personal prestige.

Too many Lean advocates, both people and organizations, have looked the other way instead of confronting this problem head-on, thinking that some improvement is better than no improvement, even though people have been harmed. That’s wrong. They need to walk the “Respect for People” talk.

I interviewed Jeff Liker recently in which he shared his viewpoint on Kata and how Kata contradicted what he understood as accepted truths in lean, such as root cause analysis. Dr. Liker argued with the fact that root cause analysis may or may not be included. He found the idea of not including root cause analysis somewhat disturbing. What do you think?

Yes, I read that. It is a good interview. I agree with Jeff. I have taught courses that include root cause analysis for 15 years. And I can tell you concretely that one or two out of 20 people can consistently do good root cause analyses. Most people are quite bad at it, even after a lot of practice. This tells me that root cause analysis is a capability that needs to be developed, but which does not need to be deployed for every problem. Though, it should be deployed by leaders for every problem that harms people – whether employees, suppliers, customer, investors, or communities.

For the last 15 years, I have asked graduate students in nearly every course I have taught the following question:  “Who has seen a 5Whys or A3 report from a senior executive pertaining to a management problem?” The answer is: ZERO! And, most senior executives have been trained in how to do root cause analysis. This tells us something very important: Executives think that people below them cause all the problems and are the ones that need to do A3s, etc.

Understanding leadership as processes makes visible the hundreds of specific errors that leaders make, which moves the discussion from opinions about leadership behaviors to facts about leadership skills and effectiveness. Leaders can no longer hide. The point is that root cause analysis is a capability that needs to be developed and used by everyone, CEO on down, when appropriate. And, let’s not lose sight of the fact that leaders are more likely to do great harm to the business than workers, so there is a clear need for them to perform root cause analysis for management problems and identify practical countermeasures.

Finally, my opinion on this is informed in part by having taught a unique course for the last 10 years in which students perform detailed analyses of corporate failures using a structured problem-solving process similar to A3. You’d be amazed at how often the exact same errors are repeated. The human and financial costs are enormous. Yet, when major corporate failures occur, nobody does a formal failure analysis. Instead of doing that, and improving leadership processes, people are fired. We cannot keep accepting this as the preferred solution to major business problems.

Art Smalley and I had a good discussion on a concern we both share: value stream mapping. What are your thoughts?

I share this concern. Generally, the widespread interest in Lean tools has been detrimental to Real Lean management, and has fueled the rapid growth and persistence of Fake Lean. The organizations that promote Lean tools have done near irreparable harm. While they have profited handsomely, the people who followed them have been terribly misled. They have wasted a lot of time, energy, and money, and have little to show for it. Most organizations cited as Lean exemplars are actually doing Fake Lean. They are doing nothing that is worth looking at – except to study why leaders so easily succumbed to Fake Lean. Let’s learn from their mistakes.

With regard to value stream maps, their importance and worth has been blown way out of proportion in terms of their use for improving processes. You do not need value stream maps to know where problems are or to improve a process. Value stream maps are just one of many pieces of information that can be called upon to help people grasp a situation. They are of no greater importance than other type of information that one may need in order to to understand a process.

Your audience may enjoy this blog post, which informs readers of who benefits most from value stream maps and for what purpose and this blog post, which criticizes how value stream maps have greatly extended the lead-time for making actual improvements.

As Lean goes beyond manufacturing, it’s taken on a life of its own. There’s the Lean Startup Movement; Lean Branding, Lean UX, Kanban for creative and knowledge work, and others. What do you think?

You can add the “Lean teaching” movement to that list. I too have taken Lean beyond manufacturing by applying Lean principles and practices to teaching in higher education. Every aspect of Lean management can be used mostly as-is, and it works wonderfully well. Students love it, as many years of data show. Like Lean Startup and Lean Branding, it is student-centered and uses rapid cycle experimentation and feedback. Lean teaching is gaining a following among university professors and K-12 teachers as well. I wish that people who teach Lean, whether trainers or educators, would do so using Lean teaching. It would be nice for students to see that consistency, which will deepen their learning on multiple levels.

Things like the Lean Startup, Kanban for Creative and Knowledge work, etc., are good if their connection to Lean principles and practices is strong, and bad if the connection is weak, incorrect, or non-existent. People need to think before creating or adopting new ideas or methods to test their consistency. If they don’t do this, then they are indiscriminately adding another tool to the tool box and will cause problems for people. It will create confusion, slow down improvement, and garble information flows.

For those just at the beginning of their lean journey, what advice would you have for them?

To be good at anything requires a lot of work. That, in turn, requires years, if not decades, of commitment. You have to gain new knowledge through reading, observation, practice, and so on, in a never-ending cycle. You should be aware that there is far more to Lean management than meets the eye, and thus careful not to misjudge the challenge. It is a lot like learning to play a musical instrument.

Kaizen is a key process for learning Lean management and for achieving flow. Therefore, it is important to gain an accurate understanding of kaizen and practice it correctly (see the book Toyota Kaizen Methods by Isao Kato and Art Smalley). Currently, I am working on a book that presents kaizen in a way that no other book does. I hope it will inspire people think more deeply about kaizen, learn more about kaizen through practice, and its importance in Lean management and achieving flow. There is no Lean without kaizen.

Let me also say that Real Lean is a lot of fun. But, Fake Lean is not. So, do Real Lean instead. Leaders who make Lean fun find that people flock to it and are happy to get involved in process improvement. Have fun together and make material and information flow.

Thanks Dr. Emiliani. Is there anything you’d like to share with my audience?

First, thank you for interviewing me. I hope that you and your audience find this interview informative and helpful. They can find more information on my web sites, bobemiliani.com and  leanprofessor.com.

When it comes to comprehending Lean leadership, everyone begins with leadership behaviors, because it is observable, albeit not so easily quantifiable. But, to really understand Lean leadership and practice it well, one has to dig deeper. You have to clearly understand the differences in beliefs between the leaders of conventionally managed organizations compared to the beliefs of leaders of Lean organizations. This is what value stream maps are really good for – not for shop or office kaizen. Then, one has to begin to move forward and understand leadership processes and the hundreds of errors that every leader makes, which can then be corrected using standardized work, visual controls, etc.

There is much more to Lean leadership than just leadership behaviors or having a casual understanding what “Respect for People” means. This level of understanding assures that Fake Lean will remain common. The challenge for leaders is to make Fake Lean rare and Real Lean common.

About Bob Emiliani

M.L. “Bob” Emiliani is a professor, researcher, author, historian of progressive management, and executive trainer. He has over 30 years of experience in manufacturing (aerospace, consumer products) and service industries, and has had front-line responsibility for implementing Lean principles and practices in the manufacturing shop floor, supply networks, and in higher education. Bob was the first to focus on Lean leadership as an area of scholarly research and is a leading figure dedicated to helping people correctly understand and practice Lean management.

Born in Miami, Florida, his father Cesare was an internationally recognized geologist and micropaleontologist and his mother Rosa Maria was a homemaker. He has a sister, Sandra. Bob graduated from Coral Gables High School and went on to the University of Miami where he received a B.S. in mechanical engineering. He then earned an M.S. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Rhode Island and a Ph.D. from Brown University. Bob married Lucinda Bronico in 1985 and they have two adult children, Michael and Julia.

Bob’s many interests over the years have led to diverse professional and personal capabilities, including: engineer, manager, artist, author, publisher, bass guitar player, photographer, craftsman (bicycle frame builder), cook, gardener, scholar, and teacher.

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The post Bob Emiliani on Lean Leadership, Real Lean, and Fake Lean appeared first on shmula.

There are a few names that are, as it were, staples in our lean education. Michael Balle is one of those. His lifelong study and practice of lean is instructive to all of us as you’ll see in this interview. We’re grateful to Dr. Balle for taking the time to answer our questions and for giving us the opportunity to learn from him.

In this interview, among other things you’ll learn the following:

• What event sparked Dr. Balle’s lifelong journey in Lean?
• Why the biggest waste is improving a process that shouldn’t exist.
• What are the 7 practices of Lead with Respect (or Respect for the Human, in Toyota’s language)
• What’s his advice for those just at the beginning of their lean journey?
• What doees Dr. Balle mean when he says that “Lean is a Big Tent?”
• What is the core message of Dr. Balle’s new Book “Lead with Respect?”

Enjoy the interview and please read his Bio after the article. Also, feel free to read our other Lean Leaders Interviews.

Dr. Balle, thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to my audience?

Thanks for giving me this opportunity to introduce my new book Lead With Respect. I’ve been a student of lean and the Toyota Way for 20 years, and my – rather narrow, admittedly – focus has been understanding what it means to “make people in order to make products.” For ten years I studied the Toyota way of “making people” until I realized I had to understand the full sentence and now most of my work is in lean engineering “making products.” My lean interest has been the leadership and transformational impact of learning to lean-think. I now work with CEOs who want to change their thinking in order to change their company, and, a little known fact about lean thinking is that when you’re past the early struggles of understanding visual management (in particular pull), it actually great fun!

What first got you started on your lean journey? Was there a specific event that sparked your lifelong interest?

My father and co-author Freddy Ballé discovered the Toyota Production System back in 1975 when he was head of product strategy at Renault. He became obsessed with understanding TPS, visited Japan early, learned Japanese and eventually became Industrial VP of Valeo, a Toyota supplier, where, in the early 1990s he developed the first full blown “system” outside of Toyota in Europe with Toyota’s guidance. I was then doing my doctoral research on “mental models” and somehow ended up studying how Toyota engineers worked with Valeo’s manufacturing engineers to lean a car indicator line. The pace of change defied anything I had imagined or heard of as a sociology student and I kept badgering the Toyota guys to disclose their method. “We haven’t one,” they would answer, “we solve one problem after the next.” I could see that, but still I was looking for a manual, until the head engineer, exasperated, once told me: we do have one golden rule, we make people before we make parts. I was hooked, and have spent an entire career trying to figure that out.

If that was what sparked my interest then, it wasn’t, however, the most interesting part of this experiment. After two years or so of work, the line’s quality, lead-time and productivity had improve radically. Productivity was 30% better than what it had been and Toyota never asked for any of it back. But let’s consider that. Labor cost in any product is hardly more than 10 to 15% of the total cost of the product. So 30% is impressive, but 30% of 10% is about 3% of the total cost, not to be looked down on, but nothing to turn cartwheels about either. The truly amazing thing that then happened was a at product renewal time – from the learning through improving the line, Toyota engineers and the supplier engineers came up with a new indicator for 27% less total cost, and then Toyota split the difference with the supplier. This was radical cost reduction. This is when I saw the real potential of lean – the making products part as well as making people part. They could never have reached that cost improvement without all the hard work people had put on the line. I had stumbled on value analysis (improve products in production) and value engineering (improve the next product at design stage: where the real power of lean thinking lies.

You recently published Lead with Respect. Can you tell my audience about the book?

Lean is loosely based on The Toyota Way (very loosely, Art might say) – we built the lean movement to learn from Toyota’s unique way of doing things back in the 1970s and 1980s and see how this applies to other industries and situation (Toyota now is a different place). From the very start, Toyota’s system was built on Just-in-time on one hand (Jidoka being originally included in that) and something mysterious called respect-for-humans on the other. For years I’d been trying to figure this second part out. It was always there under the surface, but never quite explicit until then Toyota chairman Fujio Cho published his Toyota Way.

It was clear from the start that mechanistic way “lean manufacturing” programs developed were missing something. I watched my father invent most of the toolkit of such programs as an automotive CEO, and indeed, helped with some of it to design “systems”: the kaizen events, the roadmaps, the maturity audits, the whole shebang. Yet, as I worked with my father I realized that, to him, the “system” was only a prop, a scaffolding as we’d say in learning theory. His obsession was with developing engineers, site managers, group leaders and team leaders – something we’ve tried to convey in our previous two books The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager.

Respect is about committing to the company’s success through each person’s success. Employees have a right to succeed, not an obligation. Employees don’t come to work to face accidents or harassment. It’s the management’s job to develop their autonomy and to find them work to the full use of their abilities. Lead with respect is the leadership model to create a working environment where objectives are reached by developing people.

With Lead With Respect we felt that we should focus more directly on the mysterious notion of “respect” in the lean sense. We feel that teaching lean thinking across a company requires a certain style of leadership. The good news is that these are not the usual leadership “inborn” traits, but leadership attitudes and behaviors that can be learned and taught. So the book follows the most unlikely candidate for senior leadership, Andy Ward from the previous book The Lean Manager in becoming a lean leader and now having to teach others. Of course, he half fumbles the job at first, but eventually gets in right. His struggles with learning to lead with respect and teach it to another CEO are the opportunity to detail the core concepts and practices of what we believe leading with respect mean in a lean sense – a lot of it has to do with translating business-level challenges into daily problem solving for team members through visual control, and then learning to see the impact at business level of the difficulties operators face and the initiatives they take in solving those.

If you were speaking to a hard-headed, results-only manager, what would you say to spark interest in your message and your book?

How well has the hard-headed results only approached worked for you so far? I was told a proverb in Africa: if you want to go fast, go alone but if you want to go far, go together. Lead with respect is a way to remain as hard-headed and results focused as before and engage all employees in becoming leaders for their job as well, by developing their technical expertise and their ability to work with each other, across boundaries, so that we can go far together.

There’s an old Bible story that speaks of the condition of the soil: some are fertile and some are hard, where nothing can grow. Is the message of Lean and respect for people worth sharing to ears that aren’t ready to hear? I hope you don’t mind the religious analogy here.

Biblical is definitely above my pay grade, but I hear the sentiment. Sure, some people “get it” and some don’t. Trouble is we never know who is whom and what people say about their interest in lean has to meet the acid test of kaizen with value-adding employees, where the rubber meets the road (ie, where the employee touches the product or handles the service). On the other hand, people don’t know what they don’t know, which is why we write books and public speaking to try to get the message out.

Personally, I have to confess this has never troubled me much. I see lean as a thinking practice to become more competitive and heal work relationships. I’m know as a rather hardcore lean guy so most people I work are already committed to learning lean thinking. Precicely because it is about becoming more competitive, why should we bother about the people who don’t want to go there – it’s a free world! What sometimes gives you a tooth ache is “fake” lean, seeing managers burden their companies with lean programs and damage relationships even further in the name of “lean”, which gives lean a bad name and doesn’t help anybody, but again, what can you do other than go out there and share your own beliefs? The most compelling argument might win the day, but selling the hight-and-narrow road is always harder than telling people to do what they’ve always done and call it lean instead. It’s a conundrum, for sure.

I interviewed  Liker recently in which he shared his viewpoint on Kata and how Kata contradicted what he understood as accepted truths in lean, such as root cause analysis. Dr. Liker argued with the fact that root cause analysis may or may not be included. He found the idea of not including root cause analysis somewhat disturbing. What do you think?

I’m a fan of Mike’s book but have little personal experience about kata myself, so really I wouldn’t know. My take on this is that what matters is seeking root cause, not necessarily finding it. Maybe I’m not doing this right but cases of finding something that looks like a root cause are rare. To my mind, root cause is when we’ve finally identified the error in the engineer’s calculation or model that creates the waste we’ve been investigating. But then again, you could ask “why was this error there? How come no one spotted it before?” and so on. If I had to sum up lean thinking practice on the shop floor it would be: visualize processes to reveal problems, learn to express these problems precisely, seek root cause, study countermeasure. Seeking root cause is, to my mind, a key part of the thinking process. Finding root causes, well, that’s another matter…

Art Smalley and I had a good discussion on a concern we both share: value stream mapping. What are your thoughts?

I remember at some point in the nineties when the supplier’s engineers where trying to figure out how to mix straight pull and planning for complex parts mix on an injection press, coached by a Toyota sensei. At some point the sensei pulled out a thin book with MIFAs in it (Material and Information Flow Analysis diagrams) to check the standard on the parts conveyance set-up. The moment the French engineers saw the flow and information diagrams, they started begging the sensei to teach them this amazing tool, but the sensei wouldn’t, arguing that if he did, they’d misuse it radically.

This left every one in a huff at the time, and then Learning  To See was published and we know what happened, the sensei was right. The MIFA or the VSM (not quite the same when you look in the details) are a graphic part of a lead-time analysis, no more, no less. The aim is to reduce lead-time, and to do so it’s very helpful to map how component flows and information flows interact and to draw out the next step process. VSM is a great tool, and one that, to some extent, created the lean movement, but, again, it’s a tool – when the finger (VSM) points at the moon (lead-time reduction), it’s the moon you should look at, not the finger.

Again, I have to confess I do use Value Stream Mapping, albeit rarely, when I want to demonstrate a flow point – it’s a great tool to show flow if you can, pull if you can’t. Occasionally, I’ll get into drawing MIFAs when the plant is mature enough. Mostly though, I suspect the wrong use of tools is born of the confusion between lean thinking and lean implementation. I am fortunate to count Dan Jones as my mentor, and I think Lean Thinking was a remarkably insightful book. It doesn’t talk about all the lean systems you come across these days, with their VSMs, Kaizen Blitzes, Roadmaps, Maturity Audits and so on. It talks about how some very senior managers started thinking differently by adopting lean thinking and as a result transformed their vision and their companies: to understand is to act.

As I see them, tools are essential to, effectively as John and Mike put it, learn to see – but the point is seeing, not implementing. VSM shows you one thing, MIFA another, and setting up a quick and dirty Kanban yet another. The point is thinking deeply about what this means about building quality into products with a frugal process. The aim of tools is getting people to think about what they do and not, as I see it interpreted too often, force them into yet another mode of thoughtless behaviour. I believe that as long as we focus on the thinking part of lean thinking, much of the controversy about tools disappear. Tools are a way to think with your hands.

As Lean goes beyond manufacturing, it’s taken on a life of its own. There’s the Leanstartup Movement; Kanban for creative and knowledge work, and others. What do you think?

We won the war, we did. Back in the previous century there were management “fashions.” Now, lean has become dominant (yes, yes, there still are some die hard six sigma programs or even TOC guys around, some people will always live in the past). Ironically, this is not our lean. Much of the “lean” is see now is certainly not the lean that grabbed me as a researcher twenty years ago. It has become a bureaucratic, big company institutional lean where if you follow the model, tick the boxes, apply the tools somehow you become lean. Personally, I feel that most lean programs are muda – unnecessary overcosts added to the business. Lean thinking was about the developing the kaizen spirit in every person, it was dynamic, fresh, challenging, and well… fun.

Lean Startup is a great book, but I’m not sure what’s lean about it. The “Kanban” I see used by the agile crowd is a good way to visualize the progress of work but, to my mind, misses the very point of pulling with Kanban at, say, a stamping press. Visualizing the flow of work is fine, but the point is controlling we’re using the resource to make what is needed right now, and not overproduction (whilst we’ll be running out of what is actually needed) – Kanban! Oh, well, don’t get me started J

Don’t get me wrong, I love it that all these new ideas came out of lean, and am quite excited about some of them – certainly Minimum Viable Products has been tremendously useful for my work with engineering. On the other hand I despair at how poor we old timers have been at communicating the lean spirit of the very early tools. Kanban is a very good example as all the lofty concepts of Sakichi and Kiichiro Toyoda finally came together when Taiichi Ohno pieced together his Kanban system. Similarly, Eiji Toyoda’s suggestion system is a foundational tool for respect-for-people. Still, those of us who have worked hands on with Kanban and suggestion in the nineties, coached then by Toyota sensei, have made a rather poor job of explaining it and conveying the true import of lead-time reduction and building in quality.

So yes indeed, lean has taken a life of its own, and that’s great. As John Shook says, lean is a big tent. My feeling about this is that within this big tent it’s our responsibility to keep a bright fire burning so people can see what lean thinking was about when we were all discovering this stuff. Whether they choose to seek that light or ignore it is up to them, but we need to keep that light high and bright.

Let’s suppose I’m a manager. I’ve got my hour-by-hour chart and SQDC board. We’re doing daily Kaizen and all the people on my shift have been trained on PDCA and practice it daily. But, I manage only one small part of the plant. What advice would you have for me in getting the other managers to pay attention, learn, and adopt what’s working for us?

I see lean thinking as something akin to kung fu or taichi. First you read the books, then you join the group practice in the park, then the small student group taught by a master, then you ask the master for private lessons and one day he says you’re now so good you need to seek his own master up the mountain to continue and develop your practice. The only advice I can think of (other than stop taking this stuff so seriously) is to lead by example and develop your kung fu – your lean thinking. The better you are at lean thinking, the more sensible your arguments and the easier it is to convince people around you.

The head of Toyota in South Africa recently told me about an old story with his sensei. At the time he ran the Durban plant, he walked the shop floor with his sensei who pointed out to the many papers blowing in the African wind in the plant. He explained, well, this is Africa, we get a lot of wind. The sensei answered “wind don’t make paper.” Perfect kung fu. So if we practice lean thinking to the point that we can point any inconsistency in thinking and steer people around us towards root causes, then they’ll follow. I know that doesn’t sound very helpful for all the guys out there thinking “hey, I’d love to do lean but my management/firm/conditions won’t let me,” but I always think that if we’re that good at lean thinking, why can’t we be better at convincing others? So practice more lean thinking.

For those just at the beginning of their lean journey, what advice would you have for them?

Start with figuring out product quality and takt time. The rest will come. However, if you don’t get that right from the outset of your journey, you’re likely to misinterpret everything you read and misuse every tool you’re given. Apply lean thinking to yourself before applying to someone else and, well, start thinking deeply. Also understand that improvement can only happen within a relationship, so warm hearts first, and then sharp minds. Intent really matters.

Thanks Dr. Ballé. Is there anything you’d like to share with my audience?

Lean is fun! Really. I work with CEOs in France, in a fairly desperate and depressed economic climate where everyone bemoans high labour costs, taxes, government regulation and the price of tea in China. Yet, when the CEO practices lean thinking, we never discuss any of this. It’s all about figuring out where customers are going, what improvement dimension we should focus on right now, how to bring people along with the appropriate visual control, how to better train each person and how to get them to figure out better ways of working together by solving problem after problem. There’s not one dull moment, and not one boring moment although there is a lot of puzzlement, head scratching and feeling inadequate. I’ve visited many Toyota factories around the world over the years and the surprising fact is there are no two alike, and each fails to reach the lean ideal in some way or other. But the secret is that in failing to reach the lean ideal, you’re still far ahead of any competition. As Noble Prize economist Jospeh Stiglitz explained in his latest book Creating a Learning Society, the aim is to seek dynamic gains rather than static efficiencies. And you know what? It’s actually tremendous fun.

About Michael Balle

Author and Speaker. Michael is associate researcher at Telecom ParisTech, and holds a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Social Sciences and Knowledge Sciences. For the past fifteen years, he has focused on lean transformation (how companies use lean techniques to develop a lean culture) as part of his research on knowledge-based performance and organizational learning. He has written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored two business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine and one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager. He is a leading expert on lean transformation initiatives, and an engaging and colorful public speaker, experienced in running interactive workshops with large audiences. Michael is co-founder of the Projet Lean Entreprise and theInstitut Lean France.

Lean Executive Coach. In the lean perspective, knowledge, learning and doing can’t be separated. Learning means doing repeatedly so that intuitions turn into knowledge, and knowledge drives further action. Following the action research methodology, Michael is managing partner of ESG Consultants and coaches executives in obtaining exceptional performance by transforming their own company cultures through using the lean tools, principles and management attitudes. His main coaching technique is the “Real Place Visit,” where he helps senior executives to learn to see their own operational shop floors, teach their people the spirit of kaizen and draw the right conclusions for their business as a whole. He has coached lean transformations in various fields such as manufacturing, engineering, services and healthcare.

Other Interviews you might enjoy:

Lean Leadership Interviews
Jeffrey Liker, NYT Best Selling Author, Professor, and Author of the Toyota Way	Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, shares his thoughts on Toyota Kata, why sometimes root cause analysis isn't necessary, and what else he is excited to learn - even after 30 years of being a student of the Toyota Production System.
Eric Ries, Author of the Leanstartup	In this Podcast interview with Eric Ries, the author of The Leanstartup, we learn about the how he's applied Lean principles to starting companies. He also tells us about his consulting work with GE and how GE, worldwide, has applied Leanstartup throughout all its divisions and is considering Leanstartup as its new Operating System for the company.
Michael Balle, Author and Respected Lean Thinker	Michael Balle is a leading voice in Lean. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on Lean, tells us about his book, and spends a good amount of time discussing Respect for People.
Bob Emiliani, Author and Professor of Management	This interview with Dr. Bob Emiliani covers several aspects of Fake Lean versus Real Lean. There are real insights here from the "Lean Professor".
Laura Busche, Author of Lean Branding	Lean Branding is an application of Lean principles to branding. Read her provocative and practical approach to brand branding using the principles of Lean.
	Robert Martichenko is the Founder and CEO of LeanCor - a lean logistics and supply chain company. He is also the author of the book "A Lean Fulfillment Stream", published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. In this interview, he shares with us how Lean can be applied effectively beyond the 4 walls of manufacturing and outside the office, but infused into the entire supply chain.
Peter Armstrong, CEO of Leanpub (Lean Publishing)	Leanpub is an innovative approach to book publishing, where Peter believes that lean principles apply. He claims that writing a book is essentially a startup. And, the worst waste of all is writing a book that nobody wants. Read more to learn how to apply lean to the world of book publishing.
Keith Sparkjoy, Chief Culture Officer at Pluralsight	Keith Sparkjoy is the Culture Officer at Pluralsight, a Utah company that raised $135 Million in 2014 - an unprecedented amount of venture capital. And, here's the really cool part, as the culture officer, he's trying to transform his company using Dr. W. Edward Deming's teachings.
David J. Anderson, Author of many books on Agile, and inventor of Kanban for Creative and Knowledge work	David J. Anderson is the pioneer of the application of Kanban for creative knowledge work. His methodology and approach has had widespread acceptance and adoption and in this interview he shares results from companies that have tried his approach and other lessons learned.
Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO of Kanbanize	Dimitar Karaivanov is the CEO of Kanbanize, a visual kanban system designed for creative and knowledge workers. In this interview, we discuss the product and its many uses and how it embodies the principles of Lean.
Chris Hefley, CEO LeanKit	Chris Hefley is the CEO of LeanKit, a company that provides Virtual Kanban software for software development teams and knowledge workers. Reah his interview and learn what led to the development of LeanKit and the role Lean and the Toyota Production System plays.
Dan Markovitz, Noted consultant and expert on Lean for Office	In this interview with Dan Markovitz, we learn why he believes that everything is connected to the customer through the office. Based on this belief, he feels that Lean for Office makes the most sense. Read and learn how he's implemented Lean for the Office.
Jason Yip, Consultant to software development organzations	Jason Yip is a noted thoughtleader in software engineering. As a consultant, he helps software engineering organizations get better. In this interview, we learn the state of software engineering and the role of Agile, Lean for Software and Kanban.
Matthew May, NYT Best Selling author, consultant, and expert on Toyota Production System	Matthew May is an author and influential voice in Lean and also Design Thinking. He worked close to a decade at University of Toyota to help codify the Toyota Production System. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on his experience and what we can learn from it.
Mark Graban, Best Selling Author and expert on Lean for Healthcare	Lean Healthcare expert Mark Graban stops by and share his thoughts with Shmula readers on how Lean can be applied to arguably the most important industry in the world, healthcare.
Art Smalley, 15 Year Toyota Veteran and authority on Toyota Production System	Art Smalley is one of the most honest and influential voices in Lean. He was the first American to work in Japan's Kamigo plant, the plant where Taiichi Ohno began the Toyota Production System. He shares with us his thoughts on the Lean Movement and where it is going wrong.
Jeff Gothelf, Author of Lean UX, applying Lean for User Experience	Lean is being applied to every facet of business. Jeff Gothelf shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean for user experience, or Lean UX.
Cecil Dijoux, Expert Consultant on applying Lean for IT	Cecil Dijoux shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean to IT, definitely a must-read if you are in the information technology space.
Brent Wahba, Author and Expert on applying Lean for Sales and Marketing	Brent Wahba is a fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute and shares with us his thoughts on Lean for Sales and Marketing.

Interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

In December 2008, I was fortunate enough to interview Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. In a 5 part series of interviews, we discuss the Zappos strategy and Tony answers questions on why he chooses to focus on the customer and how he sees that as strategic. Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Interviews with Customer Experience Experts
Mark Roenigk, COO of Rackspace and Board Member at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation	Rackspace Interview on Customer Experience: We interviewed Mark Roenigk on June 10, 2013. We discussed the Net Promoter Score and also topics around process improvement and how Rackspace places the customer first.
Shep Hyken, Author and expert on Customer Experience Strategy	Shep Hyken Customer Service Interview: We interviewed Shep Hyken on June 3, 2013 and discussed topics close to his heart - the customer. We focused our discussion on customer service and how focusing on the customer is strategic, not just tactical.
Annette Franz, Customer Experience Strategist and Survey Design Expert	Annette Franz Gleneicki on Customer Experience Strategy: Annette Gleneicki is a customer experience thought leader and Director at Confirmit, a voice of the customer platform. We discuss her thoughts on customer experience and the direction of the overall field.
Michel Falcon, Customer Experience Strategist and Author	Michel Falcon on Improving the Customer Experience: Michel Falcon is a former executive at 1800GOTJUNK and was the person who propelled 1800GOTJUNK to become a customer service powerhouse. In this interview, we discuss what he did and the lessons he learned.
Adam Ramshaw, Consultant to fortune 500 companies on Customer Experience	Adam Ramshaw, a customer experience consultant with Genroe, explains the relationship between continuous improvement and customer experience.

Leadership Interviews
Aza Raskin, Author, Startup Founder, and Son of Mac Inventor Jef Raskin	This is a multi-part Interview with Aza Raskin, on the Humane Interface. He discusses Agile Software Engineering. Then, in a later interview Aza Raskin discusses the "infinite scroll" approach to Google search results. In part 3, Aza Raskin shares his thoughts on Feature Bloat (aka, "Featuritis") and how to overcome it. In part 4, Aza Raskin describes the concept of Quasimodal Design and how to implement it in our software projects. Finally, Aza Raskin explains the role of Poka Yoke in the User Experience and why Lean should be applied to software engineering and knowledge work in general.
Mary Poppendieck, Author and codifier of Lean for Software Engineering	In this multi-part interview with Mary Poppendieck, the pre-eminent evangelist and teacher for Lean for Software, explains Lean Software Engineering. Then, Shmula.com readers were able to ask her questions of their own - read them here as Mary Poppendieck’s Answers to ALL Readers’ Questions, which includes questions such as Should Lean be Top-down or Bottom-up?. Then, another Interview with Mary Poppendieck. Then, Another interview with Mary Poppendieck where she explains Lean Software Engineering to a Lean Six Sigma audience. Plus, here's the Original Article to Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything. Finally, Mary considers the idea of "handoff" and how that's such a big problem in software projects - Mary Poppendieck on the Handoff and Waste
Gauri Nanda, Entrepreneur and inventor of Clocky	The inventor of Clocky, Gauri Nanda, shares with us her thoughts on innovation and the birth of Clocky
Gretchen Rubin, Author and evangelist of Happiness	In March 2010, I held a 2 part series of interview with Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness Project. Her answers to reader's questions on a variety of topics centering on happiness will enlighten you. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, shares with us here thoughts on how to be happy and what our part is in choosing to be happy. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, answers questions on happiness. This is Part 1 of 2. And, In part 2 of 2, Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness project answers more questions on how to be happy.
Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow	Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Zillow, shares with us his thoughts on this interview with Zillow back in June 2006.
Josh Coates, Entrepreneur and Startup Guy	Josh Coates, the founder of Mozy, shares with us jokes and the innovation behind Mozy.
Lloyd Hildebrand, Physician, Entrepreneur, and Enemy of Preventable Diseases that cause Blindness	Lloyd Hildebrand describes Diabetic Retinopathy and how his company, Inoveon, a Telemedicine Company, aims to eradicate diabetic retinopathy.
Ryan Kiskis, Gamer, Product Director, World of Warcraft	Ryan Kiskis of xFire, the developer of World of Warcraft, explains his thoughts on innovation.
Brian Hansen, Product Director, Kaboodle, the first pinterest	Kaboodle, was clearly the predecessor to Pinterest. We learn about Kaboodle and the innovation behind it.
Mark Jen, Product Manager, Guy who was fired from Google	Mark Jen, VP of Product Management at Plaxo, a Contact management company, the predecessor to Linkedin speaks to us about innovation and the business of business networking.
Samuel Adams, Community Director and expert on all things word of mouth	Bzzagent, the word of mouth marketing company, explains the power of the buzz.

The post Michael Balle Interview on Lead with Respect appeared first on shmula.

The Visual Kanban software market is nascent, but quickly growing and gaining traction among software development and engineering teams. In that market, there are several players. In a previous interview, we spoke with Chris Hefley, CEO of LeanKit. Today, we speak with Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO of Kanbanize.

In this interview, you’ll learn the following:

• The role of visual management in software development
• The influence of the Theory of Constraints in modern software engineering – an aspect not discussed much
• Why Respect for People is important but “fragile” concept that could get lost in the development of software

Enjoy the article and feel free to read about Dimitar after the interview.

Software development processes have undergone quite an overhaul in the last several years. On this blog, we interviewed Mary Poppendieck back in 2007 on Lean for Software. Can you help explain the difference between Kanban Software Development and Lean for Software?

Practically, there is no difference as one is a subset of the other. Lean is the culture of doing things in a highly efficient, waste-free manner and Kanban is a concrete implementation of that culture. Lean talks about visual methods for communication, which is effectively represented by the physical or electronic Kanban board.

Identifying waste is mostly achieved through value stream maps, which to a great extend corresponds to the different states on a Kanban board. Lean talks about flow and we achieve it with Kanban by applying limits to states on the board which tend to grow inventory over time. Last but not least, lean defines important parameters like Cycle Time, Lead Time, etc. which every team doing Kanban should measure and strive to improve. This is a somewhat oversimplified picture of how these two relate to one-another, but digging deeper should probably be a separate post.

Can you tell us what Kanbanize is and what specific problems Kanbanize was designed to address?

Kanbanize in its core is a visual project tracking system implementing the lean principles of visualization, limiting the work in progress, and achieving perfection. In other words, we do Kanban software. We help big companies get visibility into every corner of the organization by providing powerful analytics and reporting modules, and at the same time make the end user happy with a great UX and almost no learning-curve.

One of the primary use cases for Kanbanize is organizing a project portfolio management system that contains a high-level definition of one or more projects. Each card/item on that “Portfolio board” is the parent of unlimited nested levels of other projects or Kanban boards. We have complex mechanism to notify the different levels in this hierarchy about changes in some of the projects and by that we achieve real-time visibility at the different levels. Imagine a screenshot that immediately reveals where your 500 or 1000 people company has issues. This is what we do.

For those not familiar with software development, can you share what Work in Process (WIP) is in the context of software? And, why is WIP so bad?

I have a very simple definition of WIP and I’ve found it to be quite effective across all teams I’ve worked with. WIP is any work started that I cannot forget about. The rationale behind this definition is very simple, let’s take a feature for example. If a feature is implemented, tested, delivered to a customer and the customer is happy, then I can forget about this feature and I can focus on something else. Though, if a feature is “almost done” sitting somewhere on a test server, we still need to put effort into it (sometimes a lot of effort) and therefore the feature is still WIP to us. The same goes with issues, support requests, etc.

I would like to reiterate that WIP is not just what we are currently acting on, but rather any work that has been started and has not been finished. Understanding this concept is crucial to minimizing the amounts of unfinished work in a system, which itself is the key to improved efficiency and productivity.

Why is WIP that bad? There are two factors which attribute to the losses we encounter when we allow too much to be happening at the same time.

• The human factor. People cannot switch context as quickly as machines do and each time we have to leave one project and focus on another, we inevitably waste time. The more complex your job is, the greater losses you suffer (no wonder why developers suffer from context switches so badly). You can read more about this here.
• The economic factor. At the moment you invest time and money into something, it automatically becomes work in progress. The sooner you make that something available to your customers, the sooner you get return of your investment. That is why it is not very wise to constantly start new things and pile them on your hard drive. It’s much better for your organization if you work on a single project, but actually deliver it (and get paid for it).

And just a closing thought on this. We at Kanbanize managed to reduce our cycle time by 700% when we applied stricter WIP limits to our process. What are you waiting for?

Let’s suppose you were a software engineer for a company that also manufactures products. You have implemented Kanban in software development and Lean is being practiced on the shop floor. You and the folks on the shop floor don’t know of each other. Would there be a benefit if lean for software folks and lean folks in manufacturing work together and even support each other? How?

The answer to this question to a great extent depends on the context, but I will provide my thoughts on a more generic scale. Assuming that the software that I work on is used by the shop floor guys, I would say that it makes a lot of sense to work together. By doing so we will benefit from the following:

• Better end product due to improved collaboration. The most effective way to build software is when you have direct access to a “customer”, may the customer be another department in your organization or a real external one. I have experience with a developer in a factory producing refrigerators whose job was to work on the bar code scanner software. The end result was definitely affected by the opinion of the shop floor workers and had it not been like that, odds are that the software would have been reworked (which would cost more in the end of course).
• Establishment of a PULL/JIT system. Having both sides understand lean would definitely benefit the whole process of producing software. The shop floor guys would know what JIT means and would only ask about features that are really required at the right time. This would make it more effective for the company because a) the developers won’t work on features that somebody somehow thought would be useful, but on a really needed ones and b) the “customer” will be able to test with the very first release, which could potentially improve the overall production process early on.
• Ensuring FLOW and short feedback cycles. In line with the previous bullet, when the customer starts testing very early in the process, they will be able to provide feedback when it could actually be taken into account. This would dramatically decrease the time to market and the overall investment required.
• Common Kaizen Events. An interesting idea that I haven’t had the chance to explore personally is to have joint Kaizen events with mixed teams. My guess is that one department would be able to exchange experience and ideas that would benefit the other and vice versa.

We at Kanbanize believe that lean is always the right choice, but it becomes a game changer only when applied at all levels in a company. Toyota understood that a long time ago and their results speak for themselves. That is why we encourage each and every company out there to start their own lean transformation today.

Kanbanize changes the process of software development. More broadly speaking, can you share about the challenges that software development teams face as they try to adopt Kanban as a software development process? More specifically, can you share about a company that overcame these challenges and what were the results?

Kanban is the simplest thing to learn in theory and the hardest thing to implement in practise. This is one of the most common traps that teams fall into and our toughest challenges as a company. A lot of people think that Kanban means just putting a few sticky notes on the wall, but this is by far not the case. As I mentioned above, Kanban is a concrete implementation of the Lean culture and you will only do it right, if you have that Lean culture in your head. Unfortunately this lean culture is so counter-intuitive for many people, that they simply cannot get it, even if pushed for years. To cut a long story short, educating the right people is the key to success for a great Kanban team.

Each company that tries to implement lean in some sort crashes into the wall of human resistance. People just hate change and that’s a given. I know about many companies that managed to overcome this issue, but many more failed to do so. Among the good examples I would quote “Software AG” where I was a change agent and a lean evangelist. This company has made astonishing changes and progress that seemed pure myth a few years back. The success came through unyielding management will and a network of finely trained change agents that worked with local teams to facilitate change.

Many companies talk about culture and sometimes cite the Respect for People pillar at Toyota. Can you share with us how Kanban might support that pillar in the Toyota Production System? Specifically, can you share an example of a company you’ve worked with that exemplified the principle of Respect for People withing a software development context?

In one of my blog posts I’ve touched this one specifically. Unfortunately the blog post is called “The dark side of Kanban” and it talks about the lack of people focus or at least the absence of any rules on that subject. When doing Kanban, it’s always a good idea to have strong managers that can pay attention to the “soft” part of things. Lean comes from manufacturing, where jobs on the floor are somewhat “robotized” and if we treat software engineers the same way, we risk to impede innovation and creativity. There is a thin line that should not be crossed there.

We know that visual management is a critical aspect of Lean. In software development, why is visual management especially important? Can you share a specific example of how Kanbanize helps organizations better visualize their work?

You are absolutely right that visualization in software development is critical. As a matter of fact, when I deliver trainings to external companies I always say: “If you have to remember one thing out of this course, it should be visualization”. The most important reason for visualization is the hidden inventory. In manufacturing you cannot easily hide piles of metal ready to be processed, but in software development everything is digital, sitting somewhere on someone’s hard drive. Unless you visualize that information somehow, nobody will ever know about it and nobody will ever be able to do something about it. This is a must-do for each team, not only in software, not only trying to implement Kanban. Let’s put it that way: Each team out there should visualize their work. Period J

We’ve seen software development go through phases: waterfall to agile to lean for software. And now, Kanban software development. Where do you see software development processes going next?

The one part that I feel is missing from everything we’ve seen so far is empowering people to take the lead. No process, framework, method, etc. gives any real results in that field and this has been mostly handled by line managers. We need something in that area just how people in the nineties needed Scrum. Back then they needed specific rules to apply which would surface issues to be resolved. By resolving these issues everyone became more successful and had the time to think about something else. This is what needs to happen with each software engineer – feel empowered to change the world.

An aspect of Kanban that’s not discussed much is the strong influence from the Theory of Constraints. Generally, can you share with us how the theory of constraints might be relevant in developing software? More specifically, can you share an example of how this was actually done?

Great question. The theory of constraints is one of the determinants in my career development and my understanding of Lean in general. Systems thinking is something you need to grasp before you make a team or even a company successful. I will give a concrete example from my career that got me on the next level.

I was leading a team of performance engineers whose goal was to find performance regressions in all major products that the company was releasing. In the beginning we were only testing after the official release only to find out that most of the products had significant performance issues. This made us move testing earlier in the process. We started with once a month and when we had some serious automation in place, we moved to every day. Everyone would think that we’ve done an amazing job, because we were able to detect a performance issue within a day of its creation. How could that be bad?

Well, it could. J At some point in time, development teams had to choose whether they finish the new features committed to customers or fix the regression of 5% in some scenario that would probably affect 1% of the customers out there. Back then I was only thinking “How could fixing the regression be bad, they MUST fix it”. But later on I’ve realized that there is more than that.

If the company was able to generate more sales because of the new features, then the right thing to do would be to forget about performance (at least for a while) and work on them. If performance was a critical part of some deal and the company would have lost millions should we fail to meet the performance criteria, then who cares about the new features? My point is that we need to always think on the global (system) level and decide coming from that perspective. Creating local sub-optimums (what we partially did with the performance teams) is a misbalance in the system and one should be careful about them.

For my readers interested interested in Kanbanize, how can they learn more?

The best places to look for more information is kanbnize.com and our blog blog.kanbanize.com

About Dimitar Karaivanov

Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO and Co-founder of Kanbanize is a Lean evangelist and Kanban practitioner with strong background in the areas of software development and process improvement. With a career that started at a technical support center and went through system administration, quality assurance, performance engineering, software development, DevOps, management and process improvement, Dimitar understands what pains people at all levels in an organization have and embeds this know-how into Kanbanize, to make it the Kanban software for entire organizations.

Other Interviews you might enjoy:

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Eric Ries, Author of the Leanstartup	In this Podcast interview with Eric Ries, the author of The Leanstartup, we learn about the how he's applied Lean principles to starting companies. He also tells us about his consulting work with GE and how GE, worldwide, has applied Leanstartup throughout all its divisions and is considering Leanstartup as its new Operating System for the company.
Michael Balle, Author and Respected Lean Thinker	Michael Balle is a leading voice in Lean. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on Lean, tells us about his book, and spends a good amount of time discussing Respect for People.
Bob Emiliani, Author and Professor of Management	This interview with Dr. Bob Emiliani covers several aspects of Fake Lean versus Real Lean. There are real insights here from the "Lean Professor".
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Peter Armstrong, CEO of Leanpub (Lean Publishing)	Leanpub is an innovative approach to book publishing, where Peter believes that lean principles apply. He claims that writing a book is essentially a startup. And, the worst waste of all is writing a book that nobody wants. Read more to learn how to apply lean to the world of book publishing.
Keith Sparkjoy, Chief Culture Officer at Pluralsight	Keith Sparkjoy is the Culture Officer at Pluralsight, a Utah company that raised $135 Million in 2014 - an unprecedented amount of venture capital. And, here's the really cool part, as the culture officer, he's trying to transform his company using Dr. W. Edward Deming's teachings.
David J. Anderson, Author of many books on Agile, and inventor of Kanban for Creative and Knowledge work	David J. Anderson is the pioneer of the application of Kanban for creative knowledge work. His methodology and approach has had widespread acceptance and adoption and in this interview he shares results from companies that have tried his approach and other lessons learned.
Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO of Kanbanize	Dimitar Karaivanov is the CEO of Kanbanize, a visual kanban system designed for creative and knowledge workers. In this interview, we discuss the product and its many uses and how it embodies the principles of Lean.
Chris Hefley, CEO LeanKit	Chris Hefley is the CEO of LeanKit, a company that provides Virtual Kanban software for software development teams and knowledge workers. Reah his interview and learn what led to the development of LeanKit and the role Lean and the Toyota Production System plays.
Dan Markovitz, Noted consultant and expert on Lean for Office	In this interview with Dan Markovitz, we learn why he believes that everything is connected to the customer through the office. Based on this belief, he feels that Lean for Office makes the most sense. Read and learn how he's implemented Lean for the Office.
Jason Yip, Consultant to software development organzations	Jason Yip is a noted thoughtleader in software engineering. As a consultant, he helps software engineering organizations get better. In this interview, we learn the state of software engineering and the role of Agile, Lean for Software and Kanban.
Matthew May, NYT Best Selling author, consultant, and expert on Toyota Production System	Matthew May is an author and influential voice in Lean and also Design Thinking. He worked close to a decade at University of Toyota to help codify the Toyota Production System. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on his experience and what we can learn from it.
Mark Graban, Best Selling Author and expert on Lean for Healthcare	Lean Healthcare expert Mark Graban stops by and share his thoughts with Shmula readers on how Lean can be applied to arguably the most important industry in the world, healthcare.
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The post Kanbanize Visual Kanban Software and Why Managing WIP Matters appeared first on shmula.

Dr. Michael Balle has said that Lean is a Big Tent; which means, that there are several flavors and applications of lean, regardless of value stream. We’ve seen application of Lean in Branding, Kanban for Creative and Knowledge Work, Lean in Marketing and Sales, Lean UX, Lean Teaching, and now Lean in Publishing.

To that end, we’re excited to have Peter Armstrong speak with us today regarding Lean Publishing and how the principles of Lean also apply to how we publish books. In this interview, among other things, you’ll learn:

• Why Peter Armstrong thinks writing a book is like starting a startup company
• Why lean principles applies to how we publish books
• Why the worst waste of all is writing a book nobody wants

Enjoy the interview and be sure to read more about Peter Armstrong after the article. Also, be sure to check out Leanpub if you’are an aspiring author. We thank Peter for taking time to speak with us and allowing us to learn from him. And feel free to check out other lean leadership interviews.

Thanks, Peter. We appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.

My audience is varied, but consists generally of Lean practitioners in various settings – from manufacturing to healthcare. If you were to explain Lean Branding to someone on the shop floor who is very well aware of Lean principles from Toyota, how would you do it? On which points would you build a common bond?

The interesting thing for me about the branding around Lean is that there are two very strong brands which are associated with the word “lean”. The first is Lean Manufacturing, which is what you think of when you think about the shop floor. This is the lean manufacturing work of Taiichi Ohno – the Toyota Production System. The second is Lean Startup, which is the work of Eric Ries.

Eric Ries’ work is named after lean manufacturing, but is mainly is based on marrying the ideas of Agile software development with the Customer Development ideas of Steve Blank. Steve Blank brilliantly articulated these in his book *The Four Steps to the Epiphany*, which is required reading for anyone doing a startup. The main idea of customer development is that startup founders should get out of the building and talk to potential customers, to ensure they’re building something people want. (This sounds a lot like the “make something people want” mantra of Y Combinator, actually.)

Now, as far as Lean Publishing and Leanpub is concerned: Leanpub is called Leanpub because of the Lean Publishing ideas I developed, and I developed those ideas because of the Lean Startup and Customer Development ideas of Eric Ries and Steve Blank.

So, there is a connection to lean manufacturing, but only a loose one.

I think where we would build a common bond is on the ideas of iterating, continuously improving the product, close connection to the customer, the value of feedback, etc.

Tell us about Lean Publishing and Leanpub.

Lean Publishing is defined as the act of publishing an in-progress book using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do.

That’s a mouthful, but are familiar with Lean Startup theory, you’ll see the parallels right away.

The interesting question is: Why would you want to publish a book while it is in- progress? That’s still a really foreign idea to many people.

Now, the epiphany I had was this: A book is a startup.

There are four parallels to consider when comparing books and startups: (1) they’re extremely risky and most fail, (2) they’re both highly creative processes undertaken by one person or a few people, (3) they have historically been done in “stealth mode”, and (4) in recent history, both have been funded by external sources (VCs, publishers) which have a tendency to meddle–sometimes in a good way, other times in a bad way.

A few years ago, I published a book on Dog Poop – yes, you heard that right. If I were to do things over, can you walk us through how an author would use the Leanpub platform?

Sure! You would start by just going to leanpub.com and creating a new book. You wouldn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to start, and you wouldn’t have had to sell a publisher or development editor on the idea or outline.

You would click a button and start writing your book. You’d either write on leanpub.com in your browser, or you’d write on your own computer and sync with Leanpub via either a Dropbox folder or using GitHub. Most of our authors write in a Dropbox folder. So, you’d choose Dropbox when creating your book. We’d create a new Dropbox folder and invite you, and you’d start writing in it. You would write in plain text files, just like if you were using a typewriter. We don’t do much formatting, but that’s a good thing, since for most authors, formatting is just procrastination. The formatting that we do support is done in something called Markdown, which is really easy.

If you want to make a new chapter, you type the chapter name on a new line with a # sign, like this:

# Chapter One

And if you want to make stuff italic, you use *one asterisk*; for bold, you use **two asterisks**.

Basically, if you’re writing fiction or a business book, that’s about all you need to know.

Of course, we support a ton more stuff like inserting images, footnotes, etc, and we’ve added small syntax extensions for things like embedding external code samples (if you’re writing a computer programming book).

But the point is, the focus is on your writing, not on fiddling with Microsoft Word.

So, anyway, you start the book, and you’re happily writing in Markdown.

Now, for your dog poop book, you still wouldn’t know, however, whether the book would be a good idea or a, well, poopy one. So, what you’d want to do is find out! Otherwise, there could be the risk that you’d write a book that was a piece of poop, and it would be a poopy way to spend your time.

As soon as you create a Leanpub book we set up a landing page where people can sign up to be notified once you first publish that poop. Or if you don’t like attention, you can turn on stealth mode and hide that poop and just go for it.

Once you have completed a few chapters, you should publish an in-progress version. This way, you’ll get feedback to see if your book either entertains or helps anyone. If not, then you may want to consider pivoting, or abandoning the idea altogether.

To publish a book on Leanpub, here’s the complex process in detail:

• Click the publish button.

That’s it.

If anyone has signed up to be notified, we email them automatically. Hopefully they buy the book!

On every sale, you get 90% minus 50 cents royalties. So if you sell your poop for $10, you keep $8.50. Or if you sell it for $20, you keep $17.50.

Once you’ve clicked publish, you should get on Twitter and Facebook and start marketing. We don’t do that for you–but unless you’re J.K. Rowling, no one does anymore. Authors need to promote. Sorry.

Anyway, assuming you have validation, then you just keep writing and publishing. You can click a checkbox to email your readers when a new version is published, and they can always get new versions for free.

You own your work. At any time, you can do a deal with a traditional publisher. So, if they want to publish that poop, and their royalty deal smells good, go for it.

What’s wrong with traditional publishing? What about with Kindle Self Publishing? What problems does Lean Publishing address that traditional and Kindle Self Publishing doesn’t?

Traditional publishing has lived in a place for the past hundred years where the publishers feel entitled. If you want to be an author–a real, published author–they were mandatory. So, they all had basically the same contract: between 10% and 15% royalties.

When the ebook revolution started, they still felt entitled. So, the deal terms were the same.

But there are no gatekeepers anymore!

(Well, maybe Apple, Google and Amazon will be the new gatekeepers, since they make phones and ebook readers. And shockingly they all offer the same deal for selling on their platforms: they keep 30%. Hooray for oligopoly. Imagine if your credit card companies charged 30% fee for you to order a pizza.)

Anyway, the point is, everyone is optional except the writer and the reader. Everyone. At Leanpub we have a profound understanding that we are optional.

So we treat our authors and our readers with a respect, and hope to add value for both.

In terms of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP): Nothing is wrong with KDP.

KDP is great.

We encourage every Leanpub author to consider also selling their completed Leanpub books on KDP. It’s a great channel — as long as you price your book between $3 and $10, you get 70% royalties, and hopefully you reach a wide audience. If you want to sell your book for more than $10, however, it’s trash. Instead of paying you 70%, Amazon pays you 35%. I have two words for that. However, I’ll say two different words:

Market power.

Now, there’s KDP, and KDP Select. KDP Select is the most blatant attempt at creating a monopoly that any company has done in recent memory.

Basically, if you sell on KDP Select, you are not allowed to sell anywhere else.

Anywhere.

So, we think KDP Select is abusive and disgusting. Ironically, if KDP Select succeeds, Amazon will end up subject to anti-trust laws — so chances are they are being shortsighted here too.

If you were to list the 7 Wastes of Book Publishing, what would they be?

I’m not sure about 7 Wastes, but I’d say the number one waste is writing and publishing books that nobody wants.

What are some common objections to Lean Publishing? Can you address each of those for us?

The most common objection is that publishing in-progress books won’t work for fiction.

To that, I just say that this objection is the result of an ignorance of history. In the 1860s, all popular fiction was published as serial fiction. In magazines. The book was just what you did with successful completed serials.

This was true for everything from the “Sensation Fiction” of Victorian England (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins) to literatue (Dickens) to Russian novels (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy) to activist fiction (Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

My claim is that there’s going to be a renaissance in serial fiction. It’s already happening in China, but in the west we’re too biased to pay attention.

Currently Leanpub is a decent way to do serial fiction, but once we do some tweaks to our royalty structure to support selling individual chapters or parts for say $1 each, we’re going to be a great way to do serial fiction. Stay tuned.

In Lean, PDCA is the common framework for problems solving. Eric Ries modified that for building products and advocates Build-Measure-Learn. Within the Lean Publishing context, Build makes sense. How does Measure and Learn work? Can you share specific examples from your experience?

Build-Measure-Learn totally makes sense for Lean Publishing! Measure, at its simplest, is “did anyone buy my book”? If no, the question should be: “Should I pivot the thing, or should I abandon it?” In terms of learning, this also applies. Readers love giving feedback to authors. When a book is in-progress, this is also true, tenfold. I’m a very introverted person, but with my first book, I built a community around it, in the form of a Google Group. I found that as the book got better, and longer, the quality and quantity of feedback that I got dramatically decreased

This is why you should publish in-progress, and why Leanpub’s motto is “Publish Early, Publish Often”. (It’s also a nod to Eric Raymond and the “Release Early, Release Often” mantra from Open Source, of course.)

If there are budding authors in my audience who would like to try their hand at Lean Publishing, how do you suggest they begin?

Go to leanpub.com, sign up for free, and just start! You’ll be amazed at how much motivation having, say, three completed chapters and a bunch of readers eagerly awaiting the next book version will do for you!

Is there anything else you’d like to share with my audience?

I lead a double life: besides being the cofounder of Leanpub, I’m also the cofounder of Dashcube. (Actually, both Leanpub and Dashcube were built by my software development and consulting company Ruboss, so it’s more like a triple life!)

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing up Dashcube is this: if you are interested in Lean Manufacturing or Lean Startup thinking, you need to try Dashcube. We’re in free public beta right now, and you can sign up at dashcube.com.

Dushcube marries the Kanban board metaphor from products like Trello with the focus on conversation of products like Slack. Our purpose is to build a powerful new collaboration tool that integrates planning and communicating to profoundly improve productivity both for small teams and for the enterprise.
Dashcube immediately helps the entire enterprise reduce email dependency, have more meaningful interactions, fewer interruptions and shorter meetings. By combining planning and communicating, we enable organizations to develop a new kind of institutional memory that can be visualized and replayed.

By the way, when I say replayed, I mean that literally: you can use Dashcube’s interactive replay feature to watch how a project has developed like a sports team can watch game film, and at any point in time, you can pause and see how the project looked (every task, every message) at that point. Right now, the basis of retrospectives in lean or agile projects is a finished Kanban board and our own faulty memories and diverging perspectives. With interactive replays, teams can, for the first time, truly arrive at a shared understanding.

About Peter Armstrong

Peter Armstrong is the co-founder of Leanpub and Dashcube and the author of 4 books: Programming for Kids, Lean Publishing, Flexible Rails and Hello! Flex 4. He has over a decade of experience as a software developer, with 8 years of experience doing software development at Silicon Valley startups.

Peter coined the term “lean publishing” to describe the act of self-publishing an in-progress ebook. He has written a manifesto about lean publishing; Leanpub was created based on the principles in this manifesto.

Peter is a frequent speaker about lean publishing and startup entrepreneurship. He lives in the Victoria, BC area with his wife and son. Besides writing, he enjoys snowboarding, stand up paddleboarding and playing StarCraft 2.

Other interviews you might be interested in:

Lean Leadership Interviews
Jeffrey Liker, NYT Best Selling Author, Professor, and Author of the Toyota Way	Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, shares his thoughts on Toyota Kata, why sometimes root cause analysis isn't necessary, and what else he is excited to learn - even after 30 years of being a student of the Toyota Production System.
Eric Ries, Author of the Leanstartup	In this Podcast interview with Eric Ries, the author of The Leanstartup, we learn about the how he's applied Lean principles to starting companies. He also tells us about his consulting work with GE and how GE, worldwide, has applied Leanstartup throughout all its divisions and is considering Leanstartup as its new Operating System for the company.
Michael Balle, Author and Respected Lean Thinker	Michael Balle is a leading voice in Lean. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on Lean, tells us about his book, and spends a good amount of time discussing Respect for People.
Bob Emiliani, Author and Professor of Management	This interview with Dr. Bob Emiliani covers several aspects of Fake Lean versus Real Lean. There are real insights here from the "Lean Professor".
Laura Busche, Author of Lean Branding	Lean Branding is an application of Lean principles to branding. Read her provocative and practical approach to brand branding using the principles of Lean.
	Robert Martichenko is the Founder and CEO of LeanCor - a lean logistics and supply chain company. He is also the author of the book "A Lean Fulfillment Stream", published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. In this interview, he shares with us how Lean can be applied effectively beyond the 4 walls of manufacturing and outside the office, but infused into the entire supply chain.
Peter Armstrong, CEO of Leanpub (Lean Publishing)	Leanpub is an innovative approach to book publishing, where Peter believes that lean principles apply. He claims that writing a book is essentially a startup. And, the worst waste of all is writing a book that nobody wants. Read more to learn how to apply lean to the world of book publishing.
Keith Sparkjoy, Chief Culture Officer at Pluralsight	Keith Sparkjoy is the Culture Officer at Pluralsight, a Utah company that raised $135 Million in 2014 - an unprecedented amount of venture capital. And, here's the really cool part, as the culture officer, he's trying to transform his company using Dr. W. Edward Deming's teachings.
David J. Anderson, Author of many books on Agile, and inventor of Kanban for Creative and Knowledge work	David J. Anderson is the pioneer of the application of Kanban for creative knowledge work. His methodology and approach has had widespread acceptance and adoption and in this interview he shares results from companies that have tried his approach and other lessons learned.
Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO of Kanbanize	Dimitar Karaivanov is the CEO of Kanbanize, a visual kanban system designed for creative and knowledge workers. In this interview, we discuss the product and its many uses and how it embodies the principles of Lean.
Chris Hefley, CEO LeanKit	Chris Hefley is the CEO of LeanKit, a company that provides Virtual Kanban software for software development teams and knowledge workers. Reah his interview and learn what led to the development of LeanKit and the role Lean and the Toyota Production System plays.
Dan Markovitz, Noted consultant and expert on Lean for Office	In this interview with Dan Markovitz, we learn why he believes that everything is connected to the customer through the office. Based on this belief, he feels that Lean for Office makes the most sense. Read and learn how he's implemented Lean for the Office.
Jason Yip, Consultant to software development organzations	Jason Yip is a noted thoughtleader in software engineering. As a consultant, he helps software engineering organizations get better. In this interview, we learn the state of software engineering and the role of Agile, Lean for Software and Kanban.
Matthew May, NYT Best Selling author, consultant, and expert on Toyota Production System	Matthew May is an author and influential voice in Lean and also Design Thinking. He worked close to a decade at University of Toyota to help codify the Toyota Production System. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on his experience and what we can learn from it.
Mark Graban, Best Selling Author and expert on Lean for Healthcare	Lean Healthcare expert Mark Graban stops by and share his thoughts with Shmula readers on how Lean can be applied to arguably the most important industry in the world, healthcare.
Art Smalley, 15 Year Toyota Veteran and authority on Toyota Production System	Art Smalley is one of the most honest and influential voices in Lean. He was the first American to work in Japan's Kamigo plant, the plant where Taiichi Ohno began the Toyota Production System. He shares with us his thoughts on the Lean Movement and where it is going wrong.
Jeff Gothelf, Author of Lean UX, applying Lean for User Experience	Lean is being applied to every facet of business. Jeff Gothelf shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean for user experience, or Lean UX.
Cecil Dijoux, Expert Consultant on applying Lean for IT	Cecil Dijoux shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean to IT, definitely a must-read if you are in the information technology space.
Brent Wahba, Author and Expert on applying Lean for Sales and Marketing	Brent Wahba is a fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute and shares with us his thoughts on Lean for Sales and Marketing.

Interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

In December 2008, I was fortunate enough to interview Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. In a 5 part series of interviews, we discuss the Zappos strategy and Tony answers questions on why he chooses to focus on the customer and how he sees that as strategic. Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Interviews with Customer Experience Experts
Mark Roenigk, COO of Rackspace and Board Member at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation	Rackspace Interview on Customer Experience: We interviewed Mark Roenigk on June 10, 2013. We discussed the Net Promoter Score and also topics around process improvement and how Rackspace places the customer first.
Shep Hyken, Author and expert on Customer Experience Strategy	Shep Hyken Customer Service Interview: We interviewed Shep Hyken on June 3, 2013 and discussed topics close to his heart - the customer. We focused our discussion on customer service and how focusing on the customer is strategic, not just tactical.
Annette Franz, Customer Experience Strategist and Survey Design Expert	Annette Franz Gleneicki on Customer Experience Strategy: Annette Gleneicki is a customer experience thought leader and Director at Confirmit, a voice of the customer platform. We discuss her thoughts on customer experience and the direction of the overall field.
Michel Falcon, Customer Experience Strategist and Author	Michel Falcon on Improving the Customer Experience: Michel Falcon is a former executive at 1800GOTJUNK and was the person who propelled 1800GOTJUNK to become a customer service powerhouse. In this interview, we discuss what he did and the lessons he learned.
Adam Ramshaw, Consultant to fortune 500 companies on Customer Experience	Adam Ramshaw, a customer experience consultant with Genroe, explains the relationship between continuous improvement and customer experience.

Leadership Interviews
Aza Raskin, Author, Startup Founder, and Son of Mac Inventor Jef Raskin	This is a multi-part Interview with Aza Raskin, on the Humane Interface. He discusses Agile Software Engineering. Then, in a later interview Aza Raskin discusses the "infinite scroll" approach to Google search results. In part 3, Aza Raskin shares his thoughts on Feature Bloat (aka, "Featuritis") and how to overcome it. In part 4, Aza Raskin describes the concept of Quasimodal Design and how to implement it in our software projects. Finally, Aza Raskin explains the role of Poka Yoke in the User Experience and why Lean should be applied to software engineering and knowledge work in general.
Mary Poppendieck, Author and codifier of Lean for Software Engineering	In this multi-part interview with Mary Poppendieck, the pre-eminent evangelist and teacher for Lean for Software, explains Lean Software Engineering. Then, Shmula.com readers were able to ask her questions of their own - read them here as Mary Poppendieck’s Answers to ALL Readers’ Questions, which includes questions such as Should Lean be Top-down or Bottom-up?. Then, another Interview with Mary Poppendieck. Then, Another interview with Mary Poppendieck where she explains Lean Software Engineering to a Lean Six Sigma audience. Plus, here's the Original Article to Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything. Finally, Mary considers the idea of "handoff" and how that's such a big problem in software projects - Mary Poppendieck on the Handoff and Waste
Gauri Nanda, Entrepreneur and inventor of Clocky	The inventor of Clocky, Gauri Nanda, shares with us her thoughts on innovation and the birth of Clocky
Gretchen Rubin, Author and evangelist of Happiness	In March 2010, I held a 2 part series of interview with Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness Project. Her answers to reader's questions on a variety of topics centering on happiness will enlighten you. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, shares with us here thoughts on how to be happy and what our part is in choosing to be happy. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, answers questions on happiness. This is Part 1 of 2. And, In part 2 of 2, Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness project answers more questions on how to be happy.
Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow	Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Zillow, shares with us his thoughts on this interview with Zillow back in June 2006.
Josh Coates, Entrepreneur and Startup Guy	Josh Coates, the founder of Mozy, shares with us jokes and the innovation behind Mozy.
Lloyd Hildebrand, Physician, Entrepreneur, and Enemy of Preventable Diseases that cause Blindness	Lloyd Hildebrand describes Diabetic Retinopathy and how his company, Inoveon, a Telemedicine Company, aims to eradicate diabetic retinopathy.
Ryan Kiskis, Gamer, Product Director, World of Warcraft	Ryan Kiskis of xFire, the developer of World of Warcraft, explains his thoughts on innovation.
Brian Hansen, Product Director, Kaboodle, the first pinterest	Kaboodle, was clearly the predecessor to Pinterest. We learn about Kaboodle and the innovation behind it.
Mark Jen, Product Manager, Guy who was fired from Google	Mark Jen, VP of Product Management at Plaxo, a Contact management company, the predecessor to Linkedin speaks to us about innovation and the business of business networking.
Samuel Adams, Community Director and expert on all things word of mouth	Bzzagent, the word of mouth marketing company, explains the power of the buzz.

The post Lean Publishing Interview with Peter Armstrong appeared first on shmula.

I’m interested in warehouses. I know – it’s weird, but my interest first began at Toyota’s Supply Parts Distribution Center where I spent some time. Then, I spent several years at Amazon, where I spent a lot of time in Fulfillment and Distribution. Warehousing can get very interesting and what fascinated me then – and still does – are the factory physics characteristics that can become quite mind boggling depending on the supply chain.

To that end, I’m excited to present this interview with Robert Martichenko, Founder and CEO of LeanCor and author of the book Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream. In this interview, you’ll learn among other things:

• Why extending Lean beyond the 4 walls of manufacturing and into the supply chain makes sense.
• Robert takes us through an example where the principles of a Lean Fulfillment Stream are applied and the results they can achieve.
• Why he thinks that when you start writing and teaching, then you become the student and the evangelist – advice for those beginning their lean journey.

Enjoy the interview and be sure to read more about Robert in his Bio and please feel free to check out other lean leadership interviews.

Hi Robert, and thanks for taking the time to speak to my audience. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to my readers?

Sure, my name is Robert Martichenko and I am the Founder and CEO of LeanCor Supply Chain Group. I have worked in the logistics industry for over 20 years, beginning in transportation and warehousing supporting Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana. I have focused on my career on learning and implementing lean and operational excellence with a focus on end to end supply chain management. Early on, I recognized the unmet logistics needs of lean manufacturers. Lean had long been utilized to improve manufacturing processes, but I knew it was time to extend these programs and start connecting lean principles to partners within the supply chain. This experience allowed me to begin LeanCor Supply Chain Group for the sole purpose of supporting customers to advance their supply chains.

LeanCor is a trusted supply chain partner that delivers operational improvement and measurable financial results. As a third-party logistics provider, LeanCor offers a unique combination of third-party logistics services, hands-on consulting, and training and education that helps organizations eliminate waste, drive down costs, and instill a problem-solving culture across their supply chains. LeanCor is committed to continuous improvement and fully recognizes performance is measured by real results. In our own operation, LeanCor relentlessly tries to optimize those processes that add value and eliminate those that are wasteful. We capture our own learning and present it as thought leadership to our clients and the at-large logistics community.

Some people in our audience consists of those just beginning their Lean journey. Can you tell us about your personal Lean journey – how did it begin? Was there a specific spark that led you on your journey?

The defining moment of my career was when I got the opportunity to learn about lean principles while supporting the greenfield startup at the Toyota Motor Manufacturing plant in Princeton, Ind. During those years, I got to know leaders in lean thinking such as Dr. Jim Womack, Dan Jones, and John Shook. Dr. Womack asked if I would put together a workshop for lean logistics and lean supply chain. That started my teaching. When you start writing and teaching, that’s when you really become the student and the evangelist.

Ten years ago, I left my corporate role and started LeanCor. Our vision is to advance our customers’ supply chains through the use of lean principles and operational excellence. Putting together the book Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream forced me to synthesize my own thoughts and understand the strategic and tactical elements of implementing lean in the supply chain.

You wrote the book “Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream”. Could you tell me what led you to write that book?

The Lean Enterprise Institute, the publisher of the workbook, had long felt the need to remedy instability in information and order flow to create smoothly flowing streams of products from suppliers to customers. They needed authors with experience in combining a proven approach to this challenge with an understandable process – using the concept of total cost of fulfillment.

So they asked myself and Kevin von Grabe, my good friend and colleague, to write it. We drew from our experience designing and implementing the operational relationship between Toyota Motor Manufacturing’s supply base and the plant at its greenfield startup in Indiana. There we had helped to integrate the flow of materials in all of Toyota’s North American plants into a series of cross-docks and transportation routes. This enabled Toyota to implement both level flow and high delivery frequencies as successfully as they had in Japan despite dramatically different geography, transportation systems, and supplier capabilities.

Taichi Ohno says “All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point at which we collect the cash. And we are reducing the timeline by reducing the non-value-adding wastes.” That is essentially what our book is about.

Since Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream’s publication, readers of this book have undoubtedly validated its value proposition. For example, we had a company take this book step by step and apply it to its supply chain. The company cut its lead time from 138 days to 12 days by rethinking its supply chain starting at the customer and working backwards, systematically eliminating waste and inventory from the process so that only value remained. Lead time reduction is a major theme throughout LeanCor’s biggest consulting projects. Our clients get closer to their customer and reduce their reliance on forecasting.

You are a recognized leader in Lean Warehousing. I know “warehousing” is narrower than your focus, where you focus on the the larger fulfillment stream. But for the purposes of this interview, let’s hone in on the Warehouse. If given the option to transform, say the manufacturing floor, what are some reasons that Lean should be deployed in Warehousing and Logistics instead?

The great thing is that lean warehousing produces tangible and measurable results. Unlike other areas of our lean work, in the warehouse you can really get your hands around the results. These include labor productivity, equipment and space utilization, and inventory reduction. Also unlike other aspects of the supply chain, these activities can be measured accurately. We can have accurate baselines from which to measure improvement. Therefore, waste reduction and corresponding productivity, and cost reduction will be visible and tangible. Additionally, by focusing on quality-at-the-source, we will reduce the number of defects to the end customer. This results in increased fill rates and a corresponding increase in revenues. It’s the proverbial “win–win” situation of cost reduction and increased revenues.

In your book, you list 8 guiding principles for creating a Lean fulfillment stream. Can you please elaborate on each one and share a specific example for each?

As leaders and as organizations, we need to establish our principles relative to how we will design, execute and improve our supply chains. These principles are non-negotiable. Lean leaders are aligned around the principles and have collectively decided that “this is the way we will do business. This is the way we will run our supply chain.” The following principles and examples from Wheelbarrow Bill’s will explain the concept:

Bill is transforming his supply chain into a fulfillment stream, and has decided to apply the guiding principles to his business.

• Visibility: Make customer consumption visible throughout the supply chain and manufacturer or distribute to the pace of consumption.
  • Example: Bill takes a trip down to the local farmer’s supply store and asks the owner to give him visibility to their point of sales data. The owner agrees, and sends Bill a file once a week, this enables bill to plan his fulfillment stream on final consumer demand, minimizing bullwhip effects through his supply chain.
• Lead Time: Reduce lead time to get closer to the customer to reduce reliance on forecasting and to enable pull to reduce inventory.
  • Example: Bill decides to move his assembly plant next door to the store, and improves his assembly process to assemble orders within one week of when they are given. This enables Bill to carry less finished goods inventory, and the store to carry less in their stock-room since they no longer have to forecast several weeks of demand.
• Flow: Level the flow of all logistics activities over the entire value stream to reduce variation and enable stability.
  • Example: Bill realizes that the customer volume fluctuates between 100 and 150 every week, but on average, the sale is 125. Using smoothing techniques, Bill is able to ship 125 wheelbarrows every week while keeping an eye on any trends that would force him to ship more or less.
• Pull: Use pull systems where consumption drives replenishment to reduce complexity and over production.
  • Example: Bill takes the 125 wheelbarrows and puts a pull system in place for handles. Every week Bill produces 125 wheelbarrows depleting his handles inventory by 300, so he places an order for the 300 he used. This is a very simple ordering technique that prevents him from ordering more than what is necessary.
• Velocity: Increase velocity by focusing on smaller batches and more frequent deliveries in all processes to drive flexibility to meet customer demand.
  • Example: Seeing the stability of his supply chain, he asks the store manager to give him daily demand, and begins adjusting his assembly processes and ordering processes to perform daily replenishments. Within weeks he drops the store’s inventory to 30, his finished goods inventory to 30, and produces 25 per day while sending orders and receiving daily shipments from HandleCo for 50 handles. One Thursday he gets a call from the store manager saying he would like to start buying a different color handle, since Bill had changed his production and ordering process, he says “absolutely…I’ll tell my vendor, and start shipping them to you on Monday.”
• Problem Solving, Collaboration: Build teams, solve problems and focus on process discipline across the extended value stream.
  • Example: That next week, one of the customer orders come across asking for the old handle color. Bill, wanting to be collaborative, calls the manager and asks if that was intentional. The manager of the farmer supply store says no, but Bill doesn’t stop there. Bill asks the manager if the two of them could meet with the clerk that placed the order to find out the root cause of the mis-order, and put in place a preventative measure to stop misorders in the future.
• Total Cost of Fulfillment: Lead and make decisions based on Total Cost of Fulfillment, recognizing that all decisions have unintended consequences.
  • Example: Bill receives a call from HandlesPlus a competitor to his current handle supplier, HandleCo. HandlesPlus tells Bill they can beat HandleCo’s price by 5%, the problem is HandlesPlus is 2 days transit away, in another country. Bill sits down and documents the cost of material acquisition, warehousing, transportation, inventory carrying costs, assembly costs, distribution costs, and all costs associated with a longer lead-time. This enables Bill to model the consequences of a vendor change, and he finds out that a 5% reduction in piece price will result in a 10% overall increase in the cost of fulfillment, so he politely declines to accept HandlesPlus’ offer.

…Lastly, by applying these principles we are eliminating waste so that only value remains.

I got my start in Lean at Toyota’s Supply Parts Distribution Center in Hebron Kentucky. I was able to see first-hand how the Toyota Production System is applied to Warehousing and the larger fulfillment stream as you call it. But, even there, by the shear fact that a Warehouse existed, there was waste that was arguably necessary. Will we ever be able to get rid of the Warehouse? Is that the goal?

I suspect many people think the term “lean warehousing” is an oxymoron. Let’s face it, most lean purists believe that all transportation and warehousing functions are pure waste. Considering my entire career has been in logistics, I become a little defensive at this notion. Many organizations see logistics functions as a way to gain competitive advantage and bring value to the customer. The fact is, particularly with the growth of the global supply chain and extended lead times, warehousing is necessary and plays a critical role in the entire supply chain. The use of facilities for inbound material logistics and outbound finished goods distribution are the bridges that connect all the imbalances and lack of flow in the entire stream. In a perfect world, when we receive an order from our customer, we order what we need from our suppliers, build the product, and ship it to the customer. We would complete this all within a lead time that pleases the customer. In other words, our entire supply chain is faster than our customer expectations. Unfortunately, very few companies live in this world. Most of us are slower than our customers, which creates the need to guess, or forecast, what we might need. This results in possibly pre-ordering raw materials from suppliers and pre-building finished goods. We have to store goods that we simply don’t need yet—hence the necessity for warehousing.

One of the pillars of Lean is Respect for People. Within the context of the larger fulfillment stream, how is Respect for People put into practice? Is there a specific example you wouldn’t mind sharing?

Sure, the following are some principles of Lean Leadership that illustrate respect for people:
We create a safe work environment. We understand the customer’s requirements and “Go and See” to ensure we are creating value and eliminating waste. We listen and are empathetic and support all team members in continuous improvement. We understand and believe in the intrinsic value of all people. We build effective teams. We do, teach, coach and mentor. We understand and appreciate the mental models of all people. We appreciate resistance as a teaching opportunity. Lean Leaders invest time, effort, and resources for team member training and education, and ensure the appropriate curriculum for all levels of the organization.

Suppose a company was engaged in a bottoms-up lean transformation in an area outside of the supply chain, say the manufacturing floor. How can the person on the shop floor partner with the Lean efforts in fulfillment to have a broader effect on the organization?

The individual on the shop floor must think beyond the four walls. It’s important to deliver value and results from the position you’re in, but you have to understand what the impact of your efforts are on the total value stream.

If someone reading this is interested in applying Lean in fulfillment and distribution, what are the specific steps you suggest they do?

I’d suggest they give us a call. As the Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream book says, it’s about applying the principles mentioned above – not following a rigid step by step guide, but customizing principles to your specific supply chain needs.

Thanks Robert. Is there anything else you’d like to share with my audience?

Yes, I wanted to take the opportunity to invite everyone to our Lean Supply Chain workshop with the Lean Enterprise Institute. It’s a Gemba-based learning opportunity for supply chain professionals held three times a year at the LeanCor headquarters in Northern Kentucky. There you will “Go and See” lean principles being applied to logistics and supply chain processes at our Operations Center and Lean Fulfillment Center warehouse – go here For dates and more information.

About Robert Martichenko

Robert’s entire career has been committed to third party logistics. Beginning his journey in transportation and warehousing supporting Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana, Robert has spent over 20 years learning and implementing lean and operational excellence with a focus on end to end supply chain management. Early in his career, Robert recognized the unmet logistics needs of lean manufacturers. Lean had long been utilized to improve manufacturing processes, but Robert realized it was time to extend these programs and start connecting lean principles to partners within the supply chain. This experience allowed Robert to found LeanCor for the sole purpose of supporting customers to advance their supply chains.

In addition to leading LeanCor, Robert is an instructor for the Lean Enterprise Institute and the Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, as well as a frequent speaker for professional industry groups around the world. Robert has written several lean and supply chain books and articles, most notably the 2013 Shingo Research Award winning book, People: a leader’s day to day guide to building, managing, and sustaining lean organizations (Orloe Group) and the 2011 Shingo Research Award winning workbook, Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream (Lean Enterprise Institute). His other books include Everything I Know About Lean I Learned in First Grade (Orloe Group), and Lean Six Sigma Logistics (Orloe Group). He was recently named a 2014 “Pro to Know” by Supply Chain & Demand Executive.

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Shep Hyken, Author and expert on Customer Experience Strategy	Shep Hyken Customer Service Interview: We interviewed Shep Hyken on June 3, 2013 and discussed topics close to his heart - the customer. We focused our discussion on customer service and how focusing on the customer is strategic, not just tactical.
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I’m excited to present this interview I conducted with Eric Ries, the author of the Leanstartup. Eric’s background is in startups – having started a few himself, he wanted to find a way to reduce the risk inherent in startups. For him, a startup is a state of affairs where there is tremendous encertainty. He believes that the principles of Lean can help do that.

PS: We also interviewed Laura Busche who tells us about Lean Branding and Jeff Gothelf from whom we learned Lean UX.

Ries was influenced by the Toyota Production System and his book is filled with examples where the principles of Lean is applied to startups and entrepreneurial endevours. In order to suit the needs of entrepreneurs, he modified the basic problem solving approach from PDCA to Build-Measure-Learn, believing that this approach will better assist the entrepreneur reduce his or her risks and increases her chance of success.

In this interview – among other things – you’ll learn the following:

• How Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, said that the Leanstartup will now become the “operating system” of GE.
• How Leanstartup is applied outside of software development and in manufacturing.
• How to identify “minimum” in Minimum Viable Product.
• What’s the balance between doing it right versus the absolute minimum steps required, knowing you’ll have to fix it later.
• And, how technical debt is different from financial debt and why some technical debt can actually be good.

Enjoy the interview and please read about Eric immediately after the transcript below. And also please enjoy other interviews in the Lean Leaders Series.

Transcript

Eric, first off, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. I just wanted to give you some context before we begin. I’ve been in the lean world for awhile. I started at Toyota and I’ve worked at Amazon and eBay. And I’ve done consulting for other companies and industries. And I have to tell you, man, in my years I haven’t seen so much excitement about lean as I do about the leanstartup movement. There’s lot of excitement around it. Even old timers like Art Smalley, Matt May, Michael Balle, Emiliani; they are all speaking really positively about it.

Eric: Thank you.

So nice work on that.

Eric: Thank you; and thank you for asking them about on the record. It’s been great. A lot of those guys I don’t know at all. I didn’t know what they thought of it, so it’s been really cool for me just to see all of that happening.

Yes, it’s been really neat to see their responses. They are very excited about it, and you know, in the words of Matt May, he said that the lean startup what he sees is really this true spirit of lean, where it’s not focused on tools…

Eric: Yes.

…but really on the principles, and they can be applied anywhere really, and so it’s been really cool.

Eric: Yes, it was very meaningful for me to hear that. That’s so much what we strive for in our lean startup movement and to hear that recognized by one of the old guard was really a treat, so thank you for making that happen.

You bet, awesome. Well let me jump to my questions. I want to begin by talking about FAST Works. There’s a lot of buzz around it, and I think it’s actually really, really cool. So GE has partnered with you to help them build FAST Works.

Eric: Yes.

So let me read a quote and get your reaction to it.

Eric: Okay.

This is from Mark Little, Head of GE Global Research. He said, “We’re looking at young Eric thinking how the hell is this software dude going to have anything to say to us, and yet his ideas were transformational. I went in completely skeptical about it, and I came away completely enthused.” So you pitched to the old guard; these guys are super seasoned. You pitched to GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt. Were you freaking out?

Eric: Totally, yes, I was very nervous. And I didn’t know what this was going to become. My background isn’t software, as Mark said; it isn’t Silicon Valley. You know, I had written in my book that entrepreneurship is a kind of management, and that lean startup was a way to manage in the situations of high uncertainty that every kind of company faces, and I made this kind of relatively grandiose claim that it could be used by companies of any size, scale, industry sector, like all business authors do.

But I didn’t know whether people in those situations would actually take me seriously or not. You know, it was the deduction, it was a hypothesis that I was very confident in, but it’s one thing to be confident of it, you know, when you’re sitting down to write something. It’s quite another thing for people who are full-time practitioners whose job depends on delivering results to take it seriously.

And yes, the first time I presented to Jeff Immelt; I just told the story, it must have been to Business Week. They just did a profile about it. They were asking me the same question, was I nervous? And I said, the way you know I was nervous is I wore a suit, which in Silicon Valley you never do. But I’m being summoned to the legendary facility at GE at Crotonville.

The meeting was with Jeff and his, pretty much his top 200 managers in the world, so the most senior people in the entire company. And you know, I consulted with my wife and decided to wear a suit. Of course I show up in a suit. I’m not making this up. Jeff Immelt is making fun of me. My first interaction with him, and I was dressed more formally than he was. He wasn’t dressed nearly as formally as I was. And you know, he was teasing me, “What did you wear a suit for?” And what I got was that they’re expecting hoodie and jeans, you know, and something a little bit more flippant. So I don’t know if they took it as a sign of respect or what, but yes, I was quite nervous.

That’s awesome. Well I come from the world where you can’t dress too formally, so I think that’s awesome. Well how is Fastworks going now?

Eric: I think it’s been incredibly successful. I think certainly far beyond my expectations. And a lot of the most successful stories about it, you know, I feel like it’s not really my place to tell. As with all my clients, I want to respect their confidentiality, and that’s what gives them the safety to kind of have really candid conversations with me, so I try to follow their lead in what they say publicly.

But you know, if you look at the videos, like from the Lean Startup Conference last year, we had some people from GE there to present. (?) said that there has been a piece in Business Week, so there has been some public acknowledgement of the fact that this has had a tremendously positive impact on the company and to the point that Jeff Immelt said he wants this to be the new operating system going forward for how they do work, you know.

Wow!

Eric: For a company that has had so much experience with lean and obviously the very famous or infamous episode was Six Sigma, depending on your point of view. But one thing you can’t argue with those past episodes is that they were…….of course leaving out Workout, which is going to fall out of favor now, but was a very big deal in its day.

Yes.

Eric: One thing you can say about GE is that when they adopt a new methodology from the outside they really take it seriously; they really make it their own, and they deploy it full scale, you know. They don’t do things halfway. What I think most people don’t realize maybe about something like FAST Works is just how much work it is. It’s incredibly hard, you know, of course they bring in outside people like me, but the real work is done by the internal team. They have a full-time internal team that is driving this change inside the company. And I think what people don’t realize and should is that it’s not just for product development. We’ve done really cool things, you know, healthcare, super high-tech healthcare devices, deep sea drilling, energy, fracking. I’ve learned all about the deep, steep world of the industrial capitalism through my experience with GE; and their appliances, before they sold the division and did quite a few things with them. Lighting, you name it, they make it. We’ve done FAST Works projects on it.

But that’s only half the story. There is also the work to transform all the internal initiatives, so IT; new IT systems that are still done the old waterfall way. Changing those teams to work with the customer service mentality and really test and iterate, finance, legal, HR. They think about all the functions, the commercial functions of sales and marketing, I mean, it has been a company-wide effort.

And so it’s really engaging people all over the company. It seems like such a cliché like put up posters and say, oh, think like an entrepreneur and be more creative and whatever. I even feel silly talking about it, but the truth is we’ve had thousands of employees at the company who have felt free, I think, in some cases for the first time, to really do things in a different way, to really take the good ideas that were there before, but now actually have the freedom and opportunity to implement them. And so it’s been really an incredibly moving experience to be able to witness.

That’s awesome; nice job on that.

Eric: Thank you.

Now as you mentioned, you know, a lot of these folks are familiar with Deming and Plan-Do-Check-Act. I’m just curious, I guess, from a technical perspective, when you taught them build-measure-learn, I’m sure they were able to see some of the influence that PDCA had on your work. What were some of their reactions to that?

Eric: Yes, well Mark Little is a great example you know who we started with. He is a deeply technical person, and one of the first projects we did at GE was a very technical energy project that involved hardcore material science, hardcore engineering, hardcore supply chain and manufacturing. It was a significant, very expensive project in the context of the company.

When you have a bunch of engineers in the room, and a bunch of technical people in the room in addition to the corporate VPs and the other business big-wigs, one thing I’ve learned is you really can’t BS your way through it. You have to know what you’re talking about, and you have to be able to answer the questions that they have; namely, how does this relate to…and all kinds of things come out of their mouths. How does it relate to this concept from Six Sigma? How does it relate to the way we do supply chain, manufacturing, finance, and discovery? And to be fair, even the marketing and customer-research-type people, they have really hardcore specialty as well, and you have to really understand the connections between ideas.

And so I think that it’s a great strength for a company like GE that has that background in PDCA who understands lean. That’s a strength, and you can say, listen, this builds on a set of tools that you’re familiar with, but move them into a new domain that you’re not as familiar with, and let me draw you those connections. A manufacturing company or any company that really understands manufacturing, you know, you could say, you know, we all know that work in progress inventory is bad. We don’t want to have excess work in progress inventory, and our goal is to achieve single piece flow and to drive down buffers, and all those concepts will be familiar to people, and they’ll say great.

So now think of or visualize the hypotheses that we have about a new product, or any new initiative for that matter. Every untested hypothesis is a form of inventory.

That’s awesome.

Eric: And so if you work for two years, three years, four years; I was working with one project with five years of planning and research, and implementation before they were going to launch to customers. That means five years of massive numbers of hypotheses, just piling up. But unlike on the shop floor, the problem with intangible inventory is you don’t see it, so you don’t have that visceral feeling of this is incredibly wasteful. Where are we going to store all this inventory, all those very concrete and kind of easy to understand stories that traditional lean books are full of.

Here since you can’t see the inventory, part of the challenge is helping the company understand their own process well enough to be able to visualize what’s going on; so you can ask people who are familiar with the manufacturing metaphor to kind of do a leap of imagination, and say, look, here all these untested assumptions, all these unimplemented designs are my favorites.

People spend years designing something, but if it hasn’t yet been implemented, and they haven’t put it to the test of reality, then how do we know if the design is any good? All this inventory just piling up everywhere, and then it’s not enough to tell people that the way that they do things today is the problem. You have to, just like any lean transformation, you have to point the direction and say, we can take those same tools that you already know, you know, all the Kaizen tools, you know. Think about Kanban, and Encore, you name it, they have their analog in lean startup and we can apply that same expertise to this new domain where that will give you an advantage, if you’re willing to make the conceptual leap. And I think that’s what Mark is talking about.

I remember very well the first time he was in the audience, you know. We were working with one of his teams and he was very skeptical, and he asked very tough questions. That guy’s very smart. And you could see the light bulb go on when he’s like, “Okay, I’ve got it.” This is not just some random fad that some business person, you know, said oh hey, we should get on the bandwagon. There is some substance here. And let’s experiment to see if it will really work in our context.

And that’s the other thing I really admire about GE and a number of my clients. They are willing to do this. I would be very suspicious if someone called me in and said, you know, on day one we want to do this company wide. The CEO is going to make the official directive and we’re just going to say that everyone has to do it. We’re making everybody read your book, and of course, I’d be flattered.

I don’t think it would be effective because we haven’t actually run the experiment yet, to figure out does this work for this particular industry, for this particular business. How do we customize it; how do we use the right language to describe it? How do we connect it to the initiatives that people know and the systems that people understand? That was a lot of work that has to happen to kind of both prove, create the internal proof points, but also create that translation that makes…and that’s why we call it FAST Works. It is a special program indigenous to GE that is, you know, customized for their culture and environment.

Well it sounds like by you being able to build on a set of common beliefs that seemed to have built a lot of trust.

Eric: I think so. I mean, I come in for criticism not infrequently for calling it Lean Startup. That is not a very popular choice. As it has become more famous, you know, the criticism has more or less dried up. But every once in a while someone will say, you should have called it something different. And my response has always been the same. From the very first days when I was trying to explain this to the software people, many of them had never heard of Lean Manufacturing. The reason it’s called Lean Startup is for one and only one reason, which is that it actually does build on this conceptual machinery from the lean movement that was incredibly helpful in forming my own sense of how this was going to work.

And so, what I want is for people to be able to learn more. I think that’s kind of the obligation of anybody who’s trying to create a new set of ideas. You have to be able to give people a map that shows how your ideas connect to other ideas, and if they want to go deeper, you have to be able to point them the way. It just seems ludicrous for me to be like I came up with everything, it’s all brand new. If somebody wants to go and understand the Deming underpinnings of this whole thing, I feel like it’s my obligation to kind of give them the sign post that says, hey, that’s an important direction to take in.

Cool.

Eric: Yes, I feel like that was a very important choice, both for my own intellectual integrity, but it has had these very practical benefits as well.

No it makes a lot of sense. My colleague here, Ben, has a couple of questions for you.

Eric: Sure.

Ben: Hey, Eric, I’m a big fan. I stumbled across your book on my own, and I think I’ve gone through it three times.

Eric: Well, thank you.

Ben: ….just while road biking and stuff, and I love the examples you have, and just the concepts really motivate people to almost go into startup mode, which is pretty fun. But the question I have for you is, and I’m sure you’ve dealt with this; when you are working with a team of software engineers, and you get kind of split decisions where there is doing it quickly, and there is doing it right. The example I might give is you can hardcode the sequel statements in your code, or you can use something like sequel alchemy, or some object-oriented approach that’s maybe a standard approach. So how do you navigate something like that with a brand-new startup, and you have no product? How much rework are you willing to take to push a product out?

Eric: I appreciate getting a software question. After all this time lately in manufacturing, it’s fun to go back to it. I consider that my home. Yes, in hard coding the sequel statement; I’ve had that specific argument with people how many times in my career I can even count. It’s always tough. Everybody knows time, quality, money-pick two. I was taught that as a young engineer that the business people never seem to understand that you can’t have it all. And it was actually a revelation to me, because one of the things I loved about reading the original books I read about lean was to learn that that saying is not a law of nature. It is an artifact of a specific away of working. And if you change the system, you can change the trade-offs that are available to be able to get better ones. And the classic lean trade-off is that you really can’t trade quality for speed, because the defects slow you down. So even if you think you can make that trade, you really can’t.

The corresponding concept in the world of software, we talk about technical debt end.

Ben: Yes.

Eric: Those of your listeners or readers who are familiar with software will know all about technical debt. For those who are new to it, it’s a very simple concept that says, if you don’t do things the Right Way, and you have to imagine that capitalized R and that capitalized W, the Right Way, then what happens is over time the software gets more and more crufty, more and more difficult to change, and you have more and more bugs and problems, because you’ve been hacking and kind of kludging your way.

Picture, you know, the duct tape and the bailing wire and the whole thing. And so eventually you have to pay that debt back, so that’s why it’s an analogy to financial debt. It seems like if you borrow money, it’s like free money, I can spend a lot of money today. I can get a few extra features today, but over time if you keep borrowing money eventually interest payments are going to kill you. That’s the analogy of technical debt.

One of the big insights that I had in developing Lean Startup was something that really shocked me. Unlike financial debt, technical debt has some very strange properties. And there’s one property that is unique to the startup situation, which is that some technical debts never come due. Imagine how cool that would be, if you went to a bank and you borrowed $10,000 and you got a notice the next day that the bank has become insolvent and you never have to pay the $10,000 back. It’s your money; keep it. In the world of finance that very rarely happens.

But in the world of technical debt it happens all the time, and I’ll tell you why. Sometimes in a startup situation we build a feature that customers don’t want. And then the right thing to do is to throw it away. So if we’ve spent extra time building it the Right Way, capital R, capital W, that would have been wasted time, because it turned out we were going to throw the whole feature away.

Now that’s very strange. People are not used to taking that into account and there’s an assumption, a deep assumption in most engineering cultures is that you always know what the Right Way is, and that the thing you’re working on is always going to be valuable to customers, and therefore you never have to face this trade-off. But there’s an even worse strange thing about technical debt that is kind of unique to the startup situation. In some situations we don’t know what the Right Way is in advance. This one really bothered me.

So I’ll give you a story; I was once working in a startup, writing the software myself. I was the CTO, and it was very important to me that the software be high quality. And the way that we thought this software was going to go to market was to interoperate with 10 different third-party systems. I won’t go into the details, but we had to write an incredible amount of code to interoperate with these 10 different systems. This is before the days of clean, beautiful REST APIs and all kinds of nice interoperability standards. This was kludge and reverse engineering, and just a total nightmare to get all this code to integrate with the 10 systems.

But the payoff was that therefore we wouldn’t have to build the systems ourselves. We could leverage all this infrastructure that was out there already. And in order to do that we had to make a lot of very important architectural trade-offs, and I was very keen that things should be done the Right Way. So everything in our system was refactored so that which transport you were using to send messages, you know, it was platform independent. And there was all of this indirection and object-oriented code that allowed you to kind of swap different systems in and out. It was very elegant, very beautiful architecture if I do say so myself.

So if you’d asked me, you know, is there a lot of technical debt in this system? I would have said no. I mean, there were other assets of the systems that had technical debt in it, but this particular system I was very proud of, and it was a very core focus of us because we knew it was going to be critical to the company. High quality was very important, very good unit test coverage, you name it.

Well two or three pivots later it turns out that the business strategy of interoperating with the other systems was a mistake. And we had to throw all that code away, because it turned out there was no alternative to building the system ourselves. So I won’t get into the details, but suffice to say, instead of interoperating with somebody else’s system we were going to build our own full stack implementation of all the transport layers ourselves.

Ben: Wow!

Eric: You know, that was pretty painful, because I had all that interoperability code that got thrown away. So that’s an example of what I was talking about before, technical debt that never comes due. Whatever technical debt was in that system was removed by the fact that it was thrown away.

But now think about the architectural choices that we had made, the ones I was really proud of, having really thought through and done the Right Way; all this indirection, and objects. Once you don’t have to interoperate with more than one system, every ounce of that indirection, all that architecture went from optimal to suboptimal. And it actually introduced all this new technical debt that we didn’t know about. And in fact engineers who were hired into the company later thought that I was a complete idiot; because they’re like, why did you build this terrible architecture? You should have done it the right way. And I’m like, you don’t understand. It was the Right Way at that time, but the use case changed. They never believed me. They said, well if I had been here I would have been able to [inaudible 00:21:02] this. I was like, yes, I’m sure you’re right.

So in a startup the calculation around technical debt is complicated by these two factors. One, some technical debts never come due. And two, sometimes the Right Way becomes the wrong way. So there’s a very counter intuitive way to solve this problem. And I advocate for a system, you know, that is based in lean startup that I think really addresses this. It’s very controversial, and a lot of engineers just don’t want to do it. The article I wrote about it originally was called, Embrace Technical Debt which I thought that was going to get me lynched by my fellow engineers.

Here’s the idea. Technical debt is not bad. The question is what do you spend the technical debt on? In the traditional formulation you spend technical debt on features. Instead of doing the beautiful Right Way sequel and direction object-oriented thing that you were describing, we give hack a sequel statement, hardcode it and that saves us, you know, a little bit of time. We use that little bit of time to build an extra next feature. Now if you keep doing that that will eventually kill you, startup or no. But what if we spent the technical debt? What if we borrowed the money and invested it in a process and infrastructure so that we could go faster? And this goes back to the production system. What if we actually spent our own resources, instead of on more throughput, on quality improvement built into the systems that we create? So what if every code deployed had the equivalent of an end-on cord on it? And any kind of problems that are created are automatically reverted? We called that system the cluster immune system at my past company.

And we built in this system called continuous deployment, and it’s an investment to be able to deploy as quickly as we could. We could do a deployment in about 10 minutes. We could do it about 50 times a day on average. When I say a full deployment, I mean literally an engineer writes a piece of code, checks it in directly to the trunk; there are no branches. That piece of code is transferred directly to production and goes through an incredible battery of tests and automation to make sure that the system is fine afterwards, including the business metrics and everything that’s important to the company. And if anything goes wrong it’s automatically reverted.

So here is the idea. Instead of building more features, build better profit, better tools because if you’re able to respond more quickly to what the market needs, to change it in use case. If you’re able to change architectures quickly and easily, then that makes you more resilient to the accumulation of debt, to unexpected debts you didn’t know you were going to have to pay. And of course, it makes it less painful when you have to throw stuff out, because you didn’t spend so much time polishing it.

To just give you one more example of this system in operation, again, think back to time, quality, money, pick two, and then think with that lens through the story I’m about to tell you. In my last startup called In View, we had a period of incredibly rapid growth when we went from thousands of customers to millions over the course of only a few months. It was a very rapid S curve and the kind of growth most startups dream about. And our technical infrastructure at the start of that surge was very primitive. I’m talking about single master database, and effectively one server ran the whole site. At the end we had a very, very hardcore horizontally partitioned sharded. This is all pre-cloud computing, so pre-AWS. We had to build servers and physically stick them in a data center kind of thing. Anyway, a very cool architecture afterwards. And here’s how we got there.

We called it Just-In-Time Scalability. Every week our product was used peak usage on the weekends in those days, so on Sunday it would peak time and the site would be on the verge of falling over from a technical point of view, on Sunday. So we’d come in Monday morning; we had an operations team that would analyze what happened over the weekend. They would look at the components of the architecture that seemed like they were about to fall over, all the bottle necks and places that were approaching red zone. And we would make a plan. We would say, how much more capacity do we have to have added to this site to survive the coming weekend. And that’s not just adding servers. In a lot of cases we had to go in and refactor the code so that, like one of my favorite examples is the user’s table. Every site has this. It’s a critical table, that’s like, who has an account in the system. It’s like core, core, deep, deep, deep in a system. Most engineers are scared to death to touch the users table, because if you make a mistake there, you could have spooky actions in the distance. Any part of the site can fail as a result of touching that deep stuff. People were usually afraid of it. But we didn’t have fear, because we had all these tools and infrastructure to support us.

So we would go in and say, okay, this week it’s time to refactor the users tables so that it no longer resides on a single master database, but it is horizontally sharded across 20 databases. And we would build, implement, and test the new architecture on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Generally we would deploy it on Thursday, and that would give us Friday to kind of make sure that it seemed like it was working okay, and we’d go into the weekend. And we would do that every week for months, just in time, figuring out what needs to be refactored, and what we can leave the same.

And the architecture at the end was of course way better than it was at the start. It looked mostly like the architecture diagram we had set out at the beginning. We did have a vision for what we wanted the architecture to look like. But a lot of the details were different. If you had asked me at the start for a site with 50 million customers, which in those days was a lot I know, everything has been inflated as the web grows bigger, what percentage of the data can live on the central master versus what percentage has to be partitioned? I would have told you 90% of the tables need to be partitioned. But as it turned out, it was only more like 20%. It’s just a way of saying that you can’t always tell what’s going to be needed unless you studied the system itself.

It goes back to the old Toyota production system saying that every defect is a treasure. That used to drive me crazy. I hated that saying for so long. It seems like such a Zen crap, you know. I hate defects. You can never convince me that they’re a treasure, but I eventually learnt of course the deep truth that is there, which is that problems that you’re having with your system, and the system is defined as the combination of technical and human components together, the whole system is trying to teach you where it needs intervention, and that’s why root cause analysis and [inaudible 00:27:32] and all that stuff is so powerful.

So anyway, that’s a very long answer to a short and simple question, but I think it’s important, because there is no simple answer to those kinds of questions, and it’s why people spend so much time and energy trapped in these false dichotomies, having these stupid debates, and I wish I could have all those hours of my life back.

Ben: I appreciate the response though; it was great. And I have one more question for you. This one will be less technical, but I think a lot of your fans will appreciate this question, because they are in startup mode. Assume you’re doing a new startup right now, a software startup. You’re putting it on Amazon or something. And you need to decide which vertical to chase. You don’t have a product; there are lots of verticals available out there. How are you going to choose a vertical? Are you going to hit all of them, or are you going to hit a few? What would that process look like and what advice would you give to your readers on finding the right vertical?

Eric: Yes, actually this is not hypothetical for me. I am in fact building a startup and I am having this very debate as we speak. So I’m struggling through this myself, and it’s always hard. It’s actually very difficult to answer this question in the abstract. So the first answer is you have to look at the specifics of any given situation, because different products have different strategies that make more sense for them.

But in general, when we have a series of verticals that we could choose, there is a customer segment that we could target, I’m a big fan of targeting narrowly at the beginning. So the first question is should I target many segments or just one. It’s very easy, especially when people try to build a platform-type product, to build a product that’s kind of like 80% good for many, many different use cases. But it’s not really 100% good for any specific use case. Call it the platform disease. That’s a situation I know a lot of tech companies find themselves in. There is actually a whole section in the great book, Crossing the Chasm, just about this. It says hey by the way, if you’re building a platform product don’t make this mistake. You have to build a product that’s useful for somebody before it can be useful for everybody. So I’m a believer in narrow targeting rather than going for more broad applications, even if your eventual goal is to build a broad platform.

Okay, I’m going to target a segment, but how do I choose which one? And there are kind of two principles that are key. The first is we have to target an early adopter first. So when we think about a segment we have to think about how urgent is the problem that we’re solving for the segment? Is it like hair on fire, critically important, or is it kind of nice to have? We want to pick some place where it’s critically important, so there’s whole literature on early adopters, like in Crossing the Chasm. Steve Blank has a great chapter on early evangelists, he called them. And there are a lot of people who have written about this, so I won’t belabor that point. So let’s start with an early adopter.

And then the second criteria is how quickly can we learn from the segment? You know, say you have three or four different early adopter potential categories. How do you pick one to go target? And that is a little bit more difficult; that requires really understanding those customers to figure out who’s going to be willing to make a decision quickly? Who has a sales cycle that I can address in a short amount of time? Where are their distribution channels that I can access, you know, the classic in a consumer company, is there are certain segments you can only reach if you have premier distribution in a really high-end store. There are some segments you can just reach online with Google AdWords. All other things being equal, I’d choose Google AdWords. So those are two criteria. How important is this problem for the segment, and how quickly can we access them?

But there’s a metapoint that’s really important. Do not succumb to analysis paralysis here. Because my guess is those of you who are listening who are actually in this situation right now, your segmentation analysis that you’re doing right this second is wrong. I bet you it’s wrong. I bet you a year from now when you look back on what you used to think was segmentation, you’re going to laugh. And it can be wrong in multiple ways. One is, it’s very common to be wrong about who the early adopters are, like I’ve made this all the time. I say, okay, the segments are laid out this way. There are teenagers and adults, and I’m going to go off to the adults, oops, it’s the teenagers or vice versa. But it’s also possible for the type of segmentation you’re doing to just be the wrong conceptual framework. Like I was working on a product that we had segmented by age when it turned out that age was not relevant. We had 40-year olds and 17-year olds that were behaviorally almost indistinguishable. The age didn’t matter at all. What mattered was a certain typographic profile. So if you study marketing and segmentation and actually dive into the literature on that, there are many ways to segment. There are many ways to carve up a hole into many different verticals.

If your whole framework for carving things up is wrong, then you can’t possibly reason about segments correctly. So this is one of these situations where you need strong opinions loosely held. We call it a leap-of-faith assumption. You have to call it an assumption because you’re going to ask as if the assumption is true in order to find out what’s really going on. So I strongly recommend you give yourself a time limited window, and I’m talking like six weeks, where you say, we are going to act in the next six weeks as if this is the correct segmentation and this is our target segment. And we’ll reconvene on a designated date, six weeks or twelve, you pick the time horizon. On a certain day we will have a pivot or persevere meeting where we will ask ourselves, now that we’ve worked really hard to achieve this segmentation and serve this segment, do we feel like we’re on track. Does it seem like our analysis is holding up? And if the answer is yes, then we’ll keep going for another six weeks. And if the answer is no, maybe we’ll reconsider a new segmentation then.

But we don’t allow ourselves ever to operate with no target, no hypothesis, and no plan. It’s much better to relentlessly and ferociously pursue a plan, even if it turns out to be wrong, because that will help you figure out what the right plan is.

Ben: That’s awesome. Cool.

Hey Eric, this has been great. I’ve got one final question.

Eric: Sure.

The Lean Startup Conference is coming up in December. Can you tell us a little bit about it and why everyone who hears this podcast or is reading this transcript should attend?

Eric: Oh, that’s very kind. Yes, we are having our premier conference; we do it every year. It’s here in San Francisco the week of December 8th. For those who are trying to make a trip out of it, or are coming from long distances, we have a whole week’s worth of programming you can attend. For those who are a little bit more local and maybe that’s not the right thing, you know, the main conference is on two days. I think it’s on the Tuesday and the Wednesday this year.

And I feel like this is a one-of-a-kind startup conference. It’s different than every other one that exists. There is no press. There are no launches, no hype. This is not a conference for rah, rah, pound your chest, launch your product, make a bunch of claims about things. It’s a conference that is by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. So it’s 100% focused on learning and learning not through lecture and theory, but rather through case studies. So the vast majority of our speakers are practitioners who you probably are not going to hear from at any other conference. They are not professional speakers on the circuit doing motivational speeches. We work really hard all year long to identify entrepreneurs who you may not have ever heard of, but who have a very interesting story to tell and can talk about not how I made money 10 years ago, like a lot of entrepreneurs who speak, not what worked for me in the 80s, 90s. It’s here’s what I’m working on and struggling with right now, or very recently.

So while we do have some big names, and you can check our website leanstartup.co, you can see all the big name folks who will be there. Of course, we have workshops and in-depth programming as well. I think what makes this really unique is that we have a truly diverse range of voices who are talking honestly and candidly about what entrepreneurship is really like and yes, the week of December 8th.

I think one other thing to note is it’s probably the only conference where we have both garage entrepreneurs, venture backs like Silicon Valley style entrepreneurs and corporate entrepreneurs from big companies all in the same room at the same time. You know, we take an expansive view of what entrepreneurship is; people who are dealing with situations of high uncertainty, trying to create something new. And we don’t discriminate based on who pays your bills, and what kind of health insurance you have. So anyway, that’s the Lean Startup Conference. I hope folks will join.

Awesome. Hey, again, thank you so much. This has been really helpful and instructive. We’ve learned a lot, learned a ton from you. So thank you so much.

Eric: I appreciate it. And these were great questions, and it’s really a pleasure.

About Eric Ries

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. In 2010, he became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.

He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.

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I’m excited to present this interview with Michel Baudin who has had a very interesting and long history with the Toyota Production System.

In this interview, among other things, you’ll learn:

• Why Michel believes that Lean is to the Toyota Production System as American Chinese Food is to Chinese Food in China.
• Why he prefers the terms Lean-lite and Lean-deep to describe Real Lean versus Fake Lean.
• Why he feels Bob Emiliani is missing some critical aspects in his description of “Real Lean”.
• Why he likes Eric Ries’ Leanstartup principles, but fears that using the word “Lean” may backfire on him for reasons that have nothing to do with the ideas in his book.

Enjoy this very informative interview. And check out our other interviews also with other Lean Leaders.

Thanks Michel for spending time with us today. Can you please tell my audience about yourself and your work?

Thanks for the opportunity. I was born and raised in France, but, from an early age, used all the opportunities I could get to immerse myself in other cultures, first Germany, then the US, and finally Japan, where I went as an exchange student in 1977 after finishing my engineering studies. Three years later, a job that included organizing tours of Japanese factories for foreign industrialists turned me on to manufacturing.

Back in the US in the early 80s, I made my bones in factories as a process engineer in semiconductors, and moved on to the development and implementation of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) for this industry, an activity which took me again to Japan five years later. There, I met consultant Kei Abe, who took me on as a junior partner in his group and I spent the following eight years on the road with him in factories in a broad range of industries, in the US, Europe, and Latin-America. In 1996, I started my own group in the US, the Manufacturing Management & Technology Institute, later renamed the Takt Times Group, after a newsletter we had published early on.

Kei Abe could have his hands in foundry sand in the morning when coaching a team through an experiment, and discuss company strategy with the board after lunch. In manufacturing, he felt, management and technology issues should be addressed jointly. You cannot improve an organization by just introducing technical tools, but you cannot do it either by just reorganizing. You must have an approach that changes the way people work at all levels, engages them, and grows their skills. The key to get started is finding the right opportunity within the organization. Years later, reading Robert Schaffer’s The Breakthrough Strategy, I found it consistent with what we had been doing.

Working with Kei, I became our group’s main presenter, and developed training modules that we used at the start of projects, on topics like cell design, SMED, Kanban, Quality, etc. Later, I collected these materials into short courses that I started teaching through UC Berkeley extension in 1995, and later through other institutions, as well as in house for clients. These courses were then the basis for my books.

My first book, Manufacturing Systems Analysis, came out in 1990, and was based on my early MES work. It was followed by Lean Assembly (2002), Lean Logistics (2005), and Working with Machines (2007). For more details, visit my blog or my LinkedIn profile.

How did you begin your journey in the Toyota Production System? Was there a specific event that sparked your lifelong interest?

A hallway conversation in Tokyo in 1980. A colleague told me that, if I went to any neighborhood bookstore in Tokyo, I would find at least two books about the Toyota Production System. It intrigued me because I had never heard of a “Toyota Production System” and who would want to read about this while standing in a commuter train? I assumed such a topic would only be of interest to specialists, not the general public. So I checked it out near my apartment, and this is where I bought the copy of Taiichi Ohno’s first book that I still have on my shelf.

After reading it, I took every opportunity to visit factories that my job afforded me, and it included not only Toyota but car plants from other automakers, heavy industry, consumer electronics, and even semiconductors. It was the spark. The following year, I moved to the US and went to work as an engineer in a manufacturing plant.

You’ve been vocal in the past between the distinctions between Lean and the Toyota Production System. Can you explain?

There are plenty of reasons not use an explicit reference to Toyota when applying the Toyota Production System (TPS) in other organizations. From a public relations perspective other car makers cannot openly copy a competitor’s methods. Outside of the auto industry, people are skeptical about the relevance of these methods. And then there are nationalistic responses to the effect that “Japanese management won’t work here.”

But what is a good name? Consultants tried several. “JIT” was used in the early 80s, but it is does not encompass the whole of TPS. “World-Class Manufacturing” is too generic, and so is “Operational Excellence.” Finally, in 1989, John Krafcik came up with “Lean.” As it caught on, however, it was gradually drained of its TPS content and replaced with VSMs and “Kaizen events,” while implementers continued to believe that it was fundamentally TPS, with improvements.

I think I wrote somewhere that Lean is to TPS as American Chinese cuisine is to the original. The most popular “Chinese” dish in the US is General Tso’s chicken, which is unknown in China. It is reasonably harmless for cuisine, but the problem with Lean is these watered-down and distorted implementations failed to deliver the expected improvements.

We interviewed Dr. Emiliani recently and he makes a distinction between Fake Lean and Real Lean. Would you agree with him or are both of his distinctions fall in the “Fake” category in your mind?

I have talked more about Lean-deep versus Lean-lite. Lean-lite comes in many flavors, the most common one being the combination of VSMs and Kaizen events, but there are others, like doing 5S and nothing else. What all these flavors have in common is that they are simplistic and ineffective.

Lean-deep is not necessarily comfortable. It is an “Eat your vegetables!” message. It starts from an in-depth study of TPS. You have to drill down from specific tools to underlying principles that you can then deploy as needed, possibly with new tools, in a different context. The list of principles I have found the most useful for this purpose is as follows:

• Focus on people as the main driver of productivity.
• Search for profits on the shop floor.
• Make it easy to do what you do the most often.
• Flow, flow, and flow.
• Improve, don’t optimize.

Bob Emiliani’s Real Lean boils down to “continuous improvement” and “respect for people.” But there is more to TPS than continuous improvement. It contains a great deal on, for example, designing a production line, which is not continuous improvement. And “respect for people” is a mistranslation by Toyota people, of a principle that literally means “respect for humanity,” and it is taking advantage of the specifically human abilities of employees. Showing respect for people is being polite; showing respect for their humanity means putting their cognitive, sensory, analytical, and creative abilities to work. It is quite different.

If Lean boils down to “continuous improvement” and “respect for people,” then you can’t tell the difference with the now defunct “HP way,” with which Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard grew their company for four decades. When you read what Dave Packard wrote, and talk with HP veterans who experienced it, you can make the case that the company worked continuously on improving its products and its operations, and showed great respect for its employees, for example by subsidizing their PhD studies. In its day, it made HP a spectacularly successful company, but which in no way resembled Toyota.

I’m glad you bring that up. I’ve always used the phrase Respect for the Human. That’s what I learned. It has a much deeper meaning than just being polite as you say. It has more to do with the absolute reverence for other sentient beings. It actually has a very Eastern flavor to it that I think escapes most Americans.

Let me switch to another topic.

John Shook has said that “Lean is a Big Tent”, meaning that Lean is broad and is inclusive enough to include many different instantiations. To this end, we see Lean Branding, Leanstartup, Lean UX, Lean for IT, and many others. What do you think of all of this?

Remembering that TPS is the best known way to build cars, you have to ask yourself, on a case-by-case basis, how much of it is relevant and applicable to a new domain. I find it arrogant to assume that any business activity can always be improved by applying tools or even principles abstracted from TPS. In each case, it may be true, but you have to be open to the idea that it may be irrelevant.

I remember being impressed with steel makers in North America. These people and their organization had survived an intense shakeout that had bankrupted most of their competitors. They were the ones still standing. Listening to them left me in awe of their talent and experience, and I was not absolutely sure I could help them. It is an industry that is, perhaps, too mature to respond to Lean/TPS. You have similar issues at the opposite end of the maturity spectrum, in high technology, where you are chronically dealing with processes that are not ready for concepts like one-piece flow to work.

About Lean Startup, I have read Eric Ries’s book with interest. Having been involved with startups, I find that many of his ideas make sense, but I don’t see any connection with Lean. I think he attached the “Lean” label for marketing purposes, and that, while it has helped him so far, it may backfire in the future when the label loses its popularity, for reasons that have nothing to do with his ideas or their effectiveness.

IT is also an area that I don’t see as needing to learn from Toyota, as opposed to learning from companies that have been good at IT. People have been thinking about how to organize software development and implementation since Alan Turing. In his writings from the 1940s, you see discussions of the professional behavior of programmers that are astonishingly prescient, considering the profession did not exist when he wrote. In the 1970s, you had Fred Brooks’s “Mythical Man-Month” collection of essays about the management of software projects. Later on, Tom DeMarco’s remarkable insights. And today, you have scrum, with its pigs, chickens, sprints, and assorted mixed metaphors… All along, you have had people from the industry reflecting on its idiosyncrasies, and struggling to find ways to make it work better. It is not clear at all that they need to borrow from the car industry.

Healthcare, I think, is a promising area. 100 years ago, Frank Gilbreth successfully applied his analytical methods from production to the design of operating rooms, resulting in the organization in place to this day, with nurses making sure the surgeon always had the needed tools available. It means that there is a history of the health care world accepting ideas from manufacturing. Of course, it has to be packaged carefully, as the notion of a hospital run like a car factory appeals neither to health professionals nor to patients.

I am not familiar with Lean Branding or Lean UX, and have no opinion about them. In general, consultants and authors are free to attach the “Lean” label to whatever they want. It can be an attempt to create a perception that their offerings have something to do with TPS when they really don’t. After 25 years of being used in this fashion, the “Lean” label is long in the tooth, its meaning is diluted to almost nothing, and I am not sure using it is even a wise marketing move at this point.

Please tell us about Takt Times Group and some of the results that you’ve helped your clients achieve.

The Takt Times Group is a small network of independent consultants rather than a firm. I also learned this mode of operation from Kei Abe, who had worked in a large Japanese consulting firm and felt that having overhead and “mouths to feed” created a conflict for consultants. Having associates that you need to keep billable inevitably influences the advice you give, and not necessarily in the best interest of your clients. When he explained it to me, it resonated, because I had heard it before from an international marketing consultant in Tokyo, who had grown a firm to 40 associates and left it to go out on his own for that very reason. My partners and I have known each other for many years, work under the same brand, and share the proceeds of joint projects. For international work, we also partner with local firms, like Asenta in Spain, OrgProm in Russia, or China-Inno in China.

I think we’re in agreement regarding the utility, history, and role of value stream mapping. I know this is a hot topic for you. Suppose you were hired by an organization that had a value stream manager for every available value stream in their organization. What would you do if hired by this organization?

When introduced to a new tool, John Seddon recommends asking (1) who invented it, (2) to solve what problem, and (3) whether you have that problem, and I tend to agree. To find the answers for VSM, first you need to go back to the original name of the tool, which translates to “Materials and Information Flow Analysis” (MIFA). The closest I could come to an inventor is Toyota’s supplier support organization in Japan. And it was developed for the purpose of solving delivery problems with suppliers. So, if you have a supplier who delivers the wrong items, the wrong quantities or at the wrong times, you map the flow of materials and production control information between you and this supplier to pinpoint the source of the problem.

Can it be useful in other contexts? Absolutely. Should it be a mandatory first step in every Lean implementation? Absolutely not. It is not a big deal in Japan, and the only publications about it in Japanese are actually translations from American documents. For more details see “Where do VSMs come from?“.

Related to my earlier question on the Big Tent, what aspects of TPS which make sense for manufacturing don’t make any sense for non-manufacturing environments? Do you have a specific example you could share?

Facilitating simulation games in a manufacturing organization is an opportunity to observe behavior. In our games, teams have 50 minutes between production rounds to reflect on what worked and didn’t and the last round, design changes to improve for the next one, and implement these changes. Teams of managers and engineers rarely have a problem following this simple, formal process, especially if they are colleagues who work together in real life. Teams of production operators, on the other hand, struggle with it. You often see them rush to make changes on the production line without making any drawings or calculations.

This tells me that, while these operators may be great organizers in their private lives, at work they are not used to solving problems in teams. The will to do it is there, but you need a formal structure, a process to help them work through it. That is where tools like PDCA, Why-Why analysis, and a variety of forms are useful. Try to train a group of PhDs in an R&D lab on “problem-solving” in this manner, and they will throw you out.

Given all your experience and knowledge of TPS, what else are you working on?

I have had an interest in data science for a long time. In manufacturing, I have found clients and colleagues interested in the information I could wrangle from data, but their eyes glazed over whenever I tried to explain my methods.

At first, I restricted myself to using software everybody had — like Excel — so that others could easily reproduce my results. But it is too restrictive.

Manufacturing data is usually quite dirty, with, for example, the same product given different names over time, or Engineering, Manufacturing, Marketing, and Accounting each having different ways of grouping products into families, not to mention products with no sales but positive revenue,… You really need other tools than Excel to sort this out, especially considering that its overuse is the cause of many of these errors and inconsistencies. I have found the query capabilities of a database management tool like Access to be effective for data cleaning. Once you have clean data, I also found that R, a tool that is free to install but takes time to learn, opens the door to a whole world of techniques that are not available through Excel.

About Michel Baudin

In 1980, tours of Japanese factories made Michel Baudin switch his career focus from mathematics to manufacturing, and move to Silicon Valley in 1981, to work in the semiconductor industry, first as a process engineer, and then in the development and implementation of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), an experience that provided the material for his first book, Manufacturing Systems Analysis.

Starting in 1987, he became a consultant as a partner to Kei Abe in Management & Technology Japan, learning the art of Lean manufacturing implementation in a variety of countries and industries. He started his own consulting group in Palo Alto, CA in 1996, known first as the Manufacturing Management & Technology Institute (MMTI) and now as the Takt Times Group. He has distilled his consulting experience in his “nuts and bolts” series of books, which has so far three titles, Lean Assembly, Lean Logistics, and Working with Machines.

Michel Baudin was born in France and experienced different cultures from an early age, first in Germany and the US, and later in Japan. He received his master’s degree in Engineering in 1977 at the Ecole des Mines de Paris, now Mines ParisTech, and then went to Japan to pursue research in seismology at the University of Tokyo, where he learned the language and conducted research on the statistical modeling of earthquake occurrences that led to four refereed publications applied math.

Other Interviews You Might Enjoy:

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Jeffrey Liker, NYT Best Selling Author, Professor, and Author of the Toyota Way	Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, shares his thoughts on Toyota Kata, why sometimes root cause analysis isn't necessary, and what else he is excited to learn - even after 30 years of being a student of the Toyota Production System.
Eric Ries, Author of the Leanstartup	In this Podcast interview with Eric Ries, the author of The Leanstartup, we learn about the how he's applied Lean principles to starting companies. He also tells us about his consulting work with GE and how GE, worldwide, has applied Leanstartup throughout all its divisions and is considering Leanstartup as its new Operating System for the company.
Michael Balle, Author and Respected Lean Thinker	Michael Balle is a leading voice in Lean. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on Lean, tells us about his book, and spends a good amount of time discussing Respect for People.
Matt Long, VP of Continuous Improvement at Herman Miller Inc.	Matt Long, VP of Continuous Improvement and 24 year veteran at Herman Miller Inc. shares with us the history of Lean at Herman Miller, their association with the Toyota Supplier Support Center, and about the Herman Miller Performance System.
Bob Emiliani, Author and Professor of Management	This interview with Dr. Bob Emiliani covers several aspects of Fake Lean versus Real Lean. There are real insights here from the "Lean Professor".
Michel Baudin, Author and Respected Voice in Lean Manufacturing	Michel Baudin is an author, highly-sought after consultant in the Toyota Production System. In this interview we learn about his distinctions between Lean-Lite versus Lean-Deep and how he understand the Respect for People Principle versus Respect for the Human as is used internally at Toyota.
Laura Busche, Author of Lean Branding	Lean Branding is an application of Lean principles to branding. Read her provocative and practical approach to brand branding using the principles of Lean.
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Peter Armstrong, CEO of Leanpub (Lean Publishing)	Leanpub is an innovative approach to book publishing, where Peter believes that lean principles apply. He claims that writing a book is essentially a startup. And, the worst waste of all is writing a book that nobody wants. Read more to learn how to apply lean to the world of book publishing.
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David J. Anderson, Author of many books on Agile, and inventor of Kanban for Creative and Knowledge work	David J. Anderson is the pioneer of the application of Kanban for creative knowledge work. His methodology and approach has had widespread acceptance and adoption and in this interview he shares results from companies that have tried his approach and other lessons learned.
Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO of Kanbanize	Dimitar Karaivanov is the CEO of Kanbanize, a visual kanban system designed for creative and knowledge workers. In this interview, we discuss the product and its many uses and how it embodies the principles of Lean.
Chris Hefley, CEO LeanKit	Chris Hefley is the CEO of LeanKit, a company that provides Virtual Kanban software for software development teams and knowledge workers. Reah his interview and learn what led to the development of LeanKit and the role Lean and the Toyota Production System plays.
Dan Markovitz, Noted consultant and expert on Lean for Office	In this interview with Dan Markovitz, we learn why he believes that everything is connected to the customer through the office. Based on this belief, he feels that Lean for Office makes the most sense. Read and learn how he's implemented Lean for the Office.
Jason Yip, Consultant to software development organzations	Jason Yip is a noted thoughtleader in software engineering. As a consultant, he helps software engineering organizations get better. In this interview, we learn the state of software engineering and the role of Agile, Lean for Software and Kanban.
Matthew May, NYT Best Selling author, consultant, and expert on Toyota Production System	Matthew May is an author and influential voice in Lean and also Design Thinking. He worked close to a decade at University of Toyota to help codify the Toyota Production System. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on his experience and what we can learn from it.
Mark Graban, Best Selling Author and expert on Lean for Healthcare	Lean Healthcare expert Mark Graban stops by and share his thoughts with Shmula readers on how Lean can be applied to arguably the most important industry in the world, healthcare.
Art Smalley, 15 Year Toyota Veteran and authority on Toyota Production System	Art Smalley is one of the most honest and influential voices in Lean. He was the first American to work in Japan's Kamigo plant, the plant where Taiichi Ohno began the Toyota Production System. He shares with us his thoughts on the Lean Movement and where it is going wrong.
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Cecil Dijoux, Expert Consultant on applying Lean for IT	Cecil Dijoux shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean to IT, definitely a must-read if you are in the information technology space.
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Interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

In December 2008, I was fortunate enough to interview Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. In a 5 part series of interviews, we discuss the Zappos strategy and Tony answers questions on why he chooses to focus on the customer and how he sees that as strategic. Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Interviews with Customer Experience Experts
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Shep Hyken, Author and expert on Customer Experience Strategy	Shep Hyken Customer Service Interview: We interviewed Shep Hyken on June 3, 2013 and discussed topics close to his heart - the customer. We focused our discussion on customer service and how focusing on the customer is strategic, not just tactical.
Annette Franz, Customer Experience Strategist and Survey Design Expert	Annette Franz Gleneicki on Customer Experience Strategy: Annette Gleneicki is a customer experience thought leader and Director at Confirmit, a voice of the customer platform. We discuss her thoughts on customer experience and the direction of the overall field.
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Leadership Interviews
Aza Raskin, Author, Startup Founder, and Son of Mac Inventor Jef Raskin	This is a multi-part Interview with Aza Raskin, on the Humane Interface. He discusses Agile Software Engineering. Then, in a later interview Aza Raskin discusses the "infinite scroll" approach to Google search results. In part 3, Aza Raskin shares his thoughts on Feature Bloat (aka, "Featuritis") and how to overcome it. In part 4, Aza Raskin describes the concept of Quasimodal Design and how to implement it in our software projects. Finally, Aza Raskin explains the role of Poka Yoke in the User Experience and why Lean should be applied to software engineering and knowledge work in general.
Mary Poppendieck, Author and codifier of Lean for Software Engineering	In this multi-part interview with Mary Poppendieck, the pre-eminent evangelist and teacher for Lean for Software, explains Lean Software Engineering. Then, Shmula.com readers were able to ask her questions of their own - read them here as Mary Poppendieck’s Answers to ALL Readers’ Questions, which includes questions such as Should Lean be Top-down or Bottom-up?. Then, another Interview with Mary Poppendieck. Then, Another interview with Mary Poppendieck where she explains Lean Software Engineering to a Lean Six Sigma audience. Plus, here's the Original Article to Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything. Finally, Mary considers the idea of "handoff" and how that's such a big problem in software projects - Mary Poppendieck on the Handoff and Waste
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The post Lean-Lite versus Lean-Deep: Interview with Michel Baudin appeared first on shmula.

This interview is sponsored by HireVue, the leading digital recruiting and interaction platform provider.

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Pete’s Intro

Today, we speak with Matt Long, VP of Continuous Improvement and 24 year veteran at Herman Miller Inc.

I have long been fascinated by Herman Miller. One of my favorite books is Leadership is an Art, by Max De Pree. Ever since I first read that book, I had always been curious about the company that Max’s family started and where he served as CEO – the place where the idea of Servant Leadership originally began – Herman Miller Inc.

Several months ago, curious about Herman Miller, I stumbled upon this video, where Herman Miller explained their story of how Lean came to be introduced at Herman Miller. Go watch the video and then come back to this interview. I’ll wait.

. . . Okay, you’re back. Good.

Now several things stuck out to me in that video:

• I loved that the primary driver was a need to improve, not novelty, that drove the Herman Miller team to seek help.
• And help they got. In that video, you learn about Ohba-san and how he and his team took Herman Miller under their wing. What was that like and why would they do that?
• How the Herman Miller Performance System not only teaches employees to solve problems more effectively but it also creates leaders.
• Herman Miller has just began their NPS journey. How does NPS work with the Herman Miller Performance System?

I’m very grateful to Matt Long and Herman Miller Inc. for taking the time to share with us his thoughts and for teaching the rest of us about the Herman Miller Performance System. Enjoy the interview and read more about Matt immediately after. Enjoy.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. Can you tell my audience about yourself and your current work?

I’ve been with Herman Miller 24 years and my engineering leadership path took an abrupt turn in 1995 when we began pursuing the Toyota Production System based on a strong business need. We were very fortunate to become a project company for the Toyota Production System Support Center in 1996 when they coached us to build a model value stream in one of our plants.  The results were so dramatic, our leadership decided to apply the system across our organization.  It has given us an Operational Excellence capability we believe is unique in our industry. Since then I have been an avid student of TPS and am one of the leaders that is helping to strategize and coach its implementation across our enterprise.

I found the video explaining very beginnings of the Herman Miller Performance System fascinating. I’m curious, why did Mr. Ohba choose to spend so much time with Herman Miller on their dime?

There are three reasons of which I’m aware.  First, it’s a demonstration of the character and values of Toyota.  They have developed a superior approach to manufacturing and business and they are willing to share it with others that are truly interested.  Second, they use these projects as a way to develop their own leader’s deep thinking about TPS.  Many of our coaches from TSSC have gone on to leadership positions within Toyota.  Third, it supports their commitment within NAFTA to share their manufacturing practices with US companies.  By the way, Toyota recently made a couple of videos that highlight our story from their point of view.  They’re posted on tssc.com under the heading of Projects/General Industry.

Out of curiosity, I wonder if you could share with us what items were on that original to-do list that Mr. Ohba wanted you all to consider?

Sure – I should mention that the first thing Mr. Ohba did was redirect us from starting at the beginning of our process (stamping) to the end of our process (shipping and assembly).  The “to do” list was not so much a list as it was a shift in focus to understand our actual customer demand and getting the facts around what it would take to assemble and ship just what the customer needed each day.  That would set the pace for the rest of the operation upstream and show us our true bottlenecks.  At that time, we were building in weekly buckets so as long as we hit a quantity of units, we thought we were successful.  We needed to learn to reduce our batch sizes to daily and ultimately one by one.

Can you share with us about the Herman Miller Performance System? Perhaps tell us about the level of training, content of the material, and how it is infused into the culture of the company?

The Herman Miller Performance System (HMPS) is our adaptation of TPS, so it follows very closely to Toyota’s system.  We define it as “a system that focuses on understanding and meeting our customer’s needs exactly through the engagement and development of our employees”.  It contains three elements including the Technical Tools (Toyota’s house), the 4 Philosophies (adopted from Toyota) and the Management System.  We show these as three spokes in a wheel with our people at the center of the hub.  It helps explain that we need to pay attention to the lengths of the spokes so our system doesn’t get out of balance.  We’ve found that developing our people is one of the big keys to our success and a key part of growing the culture.  For example, we have a program we call “Bridge” designed for front line support.  The program lasts for 6 months and includes key HMPS concepts and their application on existing business needs, interpersonal and leadership training and an internship.  By the time each person completes the program, the HMPS approach has become their “default”.  That’s how we know we are changing our culture.  It’s a big investment but we’ve shown that it pays back quickly.

Let’s shift topics a little bit. I want to discuss NPS. I know that Herman Miller has just began its NPS journey. Have you or do you expect to interact with your internal NPS advocates and become part of the closed-loop feedback system and make improvements a reality back into manufacturing?

We’ve been experimenting with NPS in a couple of pilot areas with the coaching of the Bain group to start slowly and build the system.  It fits very well with our HMPS methodology of focusing on meeting customer demand and highlighting and solving problems on a progressive level.  It is definitely one of the tools we are using to build a robust feedback loop for our entire operational value stream.  But we’re only going expand as fast as we can grow our problem solving muscle.

Herman Miller has a long standing reputation in leadership development – with many books written about how people are developed there. In your view, has leadership development at Herman Miller been influenced to some degree by Toyota’s principle of Respect for People? How?

You’re right, Herman Miller’s founders, the DePrees, were early pioneers of servant leadership and employee engagement and their books are still used in many management courses.  These are aspirational values that drew many of us to work at Herman Miller.  I like to say that HMPS has given “legs” to these aspirations because the management system provides a framework for engagement at all levels.  In our early years, Mr. Ohba had Dr. Kent Bowen come and speak to our top leadership about flipping the management pyramid upside down so that the employees providing value-added work are at the top and all the management levels below are there to support them and solve problems that get in their way.  That has had a lasting impact on our leadership approach.

Back to the Herman Miller Performance System. Has Herman Miller gone beyond the 4 walls of manufacturing and applied HMPS to its supply chain and dealer network? If so, how is that going?

During the 2002 recession, we came to the realization that, in spite of our great progress with HMPS in manufacturing, our end customers were not feeling much of an improvement.  It was then we discovered we needed to extend our value stream to our suppliers and our dealers.  So we mobilized an effort we call the First Mile with our key suppliers and an effort with our Certified Dealers called the Last Mile.  In both cases, we’re partnering with them to look at the entire value stream and work together on issues that impact quality, cost and delivery from the customer’s viewpoint. We’re coaching them on HMPS much like TSSC did with us.  We also changed the name from Herman Miller Production System to Herman Miller Performance System to diffuse the perception that HMPS only applies to Manufacturing.

Something interesting is happening in the lean movement. The principles of Lean is taking hold of the entrepreneurship community, with the advent of the Leanstartup, from Eric Ries. If you’re familiar with the Leanstartup, what are your thoughts about it?

We’ve read Eric’s book and have begun thinking about how it could apply to our new product development.  We like the idea of quick learning cycles to inform our direction in a way the truly meets the needs of the customer.  It is also consistent with our coaching from Toyota to try experiments in small steps to incrementally arrive at a lasting solution.

What about applying Lean in the office or non-manufacturing environments? Is the Herman Miller Performance System at work in the Office?

We purposely kept our focus on manufacturing for a number of years to make sure we had a sustainable system before moving to new areas like the office.  However, we now realize that our continued success depends on considering the entire Operational Value Stream from design to service.  We’re actively working in new product development, product engineering, order management, and customer service/support in addition to the suppliers and dealers mentioned earlier.  Each area brings its own challenges in understanding the “hidden” process and developing new tools that meet each business need but we are very excited about the progress and potential of this work.

Now, Art Smalley and I have a beef with something the rest of the lean world seems to have a love affair with: value stream mapping. I see many tool centric approaches to Lean, rather than a system, behavior, habitual, daily approach. What’s your reaction to that?

You’ve struck a nerve with me too!  I see the same tendency for a company pursuing Lean to adopt tools before they have the basic thinking required to see what problem they were designed to solve and how to use them effectively.  We learned that hard lesson early on as we pressed hard to implement tools like continuous flow, zero changeover, andon, etc. thinking THAT was TPS.  One of my clearest memories is our coach, Shingo, making me stand at the assembly line to see the burden we had thrust on the backs of our employees by implementing too many tools to highlight problems but not having enough problem solving capability to eliminate them.  He explained TPS is a side-by-side system with tools to highlight problems and human capability to solve problems.  You only need enough tools in place to see the next problem, then you need to develop a problem solving muscle in order to respect and value your people. TSSC didn’t teach us value stream mapping until we were three years into our journey with some basic thinking of our own.

Matt, thank you for taking time to speak with me today. In closing, what would you share with others that are either struggling with their lean implementation?

First, Lean/TPS is a long term, systemic effort and there is no single “recipe” for success because every company’s culture and business situation is different.  The key is aligning the effort with your business needs and using the PDCA loop to make incremental improvement and capture learning through frequent reflection.  Don’t get discouraged!  Ohno said an intelligent person is still wrong at least 50% of the time!  Establish some early success and credibility by focusing your efforts on solving team member’s struggles.  It shows you value them and builds momentum in the improvement culture.  And finally, keep a long-term focus on building the customer value stream.  It’s easy to get sidetracked on short term metrics or projects but it’s the customer that ultimately decides if we are bringing them value.  I hope sharing our experiences will encourage others to stay the course!

About Matt Long

Matt Long currently leads a group of managers and coaches responsible for implementing the Herman Miller Performance System (HMPS), an adaptation of the Toyota Production System, within Suppliers, Operations, Distribution, Dealers, Sales and business processes.  This system has transformed Herman Miller, a company already known for its iconic designs and its participative environment, into an organization of operational excellence.  Matt has been with Herman Miller for 24 years. Prior to Herman Miller, Matt long gained experience in manufacturing and aerospace, for 10 years.

Lean Leadership Interviews
Jeffrey Liker, NYT Best Selling Author, Professor, and Author of the Toyota Way	Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, shares his thoughts on Toyota Kata, why sometimes root cause analysis isn't necessary, and what else he is excited to learn - even after 30 years of being a student of the Toyota Production System.
Eric Ries, Author of the Leanstartup	In this Podcast interview with Eric Ries, the author of The Leanstartup, we learn about the how he's applied Lean principles to starting companies. He also tells us about his consulting work with GE and how GE, worldwide, has applied Leanstartup throughout all its divisions and is considering Leanstartup as its new Operating System for the company.
Michael Balle, Author and Respected Lean Thinker	Michael Balle is a leading voice in Lean. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on Lean, tells us about his book, and spends a good amount of time discussing Respect for People.
Matt Long, VP of Continuous Improvement at Herman Miller Inc.	Matt Long, VP of Continuous Improvement and 24 year veteran at Herman Miller Inc. shares with us the history of Lean at Herman Miller, their association with the Toyota Supplier Support Center, and about the Herman Miller Performance System.
Bob Emiliani, Author and Professor of Management	This interview with Dr. Bob Emiliani covers several aspects of Fake Lean versus Real Lean. There are real insights here from the "Lean Professor".
Michel Baudin, Author and Respected Voice in Lean Manufacturing	Michel Baudin is an author, highly-sought after consultant in the Toyota Production System. In this interview we learn about his distinctions between Lean-Lite versus Lean-Deep and how he understand the Respect for People Principle versus Respect for the Human as is used internally at Toyota.
Laura Busche, Author of Lean Branding	Lean Branding is an application of Lean principles to branding. Read her provocative and practical approach to brand branding using the principles of Lean.
	Robert Martichenko is the Founder and CEO of LeanCor - a lean logistics and supply chain company. He is also the author of the book "A Lean Fulfillment Stream", published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. In this interview, he shares with us how Lean can be applied effectively beyond the 4 walls of manufacturing and outside the office, but infused into the entire supply chain.
Peter Armstrong, CEO of Leanpub (Lean Publishing)	Leanpub is an innovative approach to book publishing, where Peter believes that lean principles apply. He claims that writing a book is essentially a startup. And, the worst waste of all is writing a book that nobody wants. Read more to learn how to apply lean to the world of book publishing.
Keith Sparkjoy, Chief Culture Officer at Pluralsight	Keith Sparkjoy is the Culture Officer at Pluralsight, a Utah company that raised $135 Million in 2014 - an unprecedented amount of venture capital. And, here's the really cool part, as the culture officer, he's trying to transform his company using Dr. W. Edward Deming's teachings.
David J. Anderson, Author of many books on Agile, and inventor of Kanban for Creative and Knowledge work	David J. Anderson is the pioneer of the application of Kanban for creative knowledge work. His methodology and approach has had widespread acceptance and adoption and in this interview he shares results from companies that have tried his approach and other lessons learned.
Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO of Kanbanize	Dimitar Karaivanov is the CEO of Kanbanize, a visual kanban system designed for creative and knowledge workers. In this interview, we discuss the product and its many uses and how it embodies the principles of Lean.
Chris Hefley, CEO LeanKit	Chris Hefley is the CEO of LeanKit, a company that provides Virtual Kanban software for software development teams and knowledge workers. Reah his interview and learn what led to the development of LeanKit and the role Lean and the Toyota Production System plays.
Dan Markovitz, Noted consultant and expert on Lean for Office	In this interview with Dan Markovitz, we learn why he believes that everything is connected to the customer through the office. Based on this belief, he feels that Lean for Office makes the most sense. Read and learn how he's implemented Lean for the Office.
Jason Yip, Consultant to software development organzations	Jason Yip is a noted thoughtleader in software engineering. As a consultant, he helps software engineering organizations get better. In this interview, we learn the state of software engineering and the role of Agile, Lean for Software and Kanban.
Matthew May, NYT Best Selling author, consultant, and expert on Toyota Production System	Matthew May is an author and influential voice in Lean and also Design Thinking. He worked close to a decade at University of Toyota to help codify the Toyota Production System. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on his experience and what we can learn from it.
Mark Graban, Best Selling Author and expert on Lean for Healthcare	Lean Healthcare expert Mark Graban stops by and share his thoughts with Shmula readers on how Lean can be applied to arguably the most important industry in the world, healthcare.
Art Smalley, 15 Year Toyota Veteran and authority on Toyota Production System	Art Smalley is one of the most honest and influential voices in Lean. He was the first American to work in Japan's Kamigo plant, the plant where Taiichi Ohno began the Toyota Production System. He shares with us his thoughts on the Lean Movement and where it is going wrong.
Jeff Gothelf, Author of Lean UX, applying Lean for User Experience	Lean is being applied to every facet of business. Jeff Gothelf shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean for user experience, or Lean UX.
Cecil Dijoux, Expert Consultant on applying Lean for IT	Cecil Dijoux shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean to IT, definitely a must-read if you are in the information technology space.
Brent Wahba, Author and Expert on applying Lean for Sales and Marketing	Brent Wahba is a fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute and shares with us his thoughts on Lean for Sales and Marketing.

Interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

In December 2008, I was fortunate enough to interview Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. In a 5 part series of interviews, we discuss the Zappos strategy and Tony answers questions on why he chooses to focus on the customer and how he sees that as strategic. Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Interviews with Customer Experience Experts
Mark Roenigk, COO of Rackspace and Board Member at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation	Rackspace Interview on Customer Experience: We interviewed Mark Roenigk on June 10, 2013. We discussed the Net Promoter Score and also topics around process improvement and how Rackspace places the customer first.
Shep Hyken, Author and expert on Customer Experience Strategy	Shep Hyken Customer Service Interview: We interviewed Shep Hyken on June 3, 2013 and discussed topics close to his heart - the customer. We focused our discussion on customer service and how focusing on the customer is strategic, not just tactical.
Annette Franz, Customer Experience Strategist and Survey Design Expert	Annette Franz Gleneicki on Customer Experience Strategy: Annette Gleneicki is a customer experience thought leader and Director at Confirmit, a voice of the customer platform. We discuss her thoughts on customer experience and the direction of the overall field.
Michel Falcon, Customer Experience Strategist and Author	Michel Falcon on Improving the Customer Experience: Michel Falcon is a former executive at 1800GOTJUNK and was the person who propelled 1800GOTJUNK to become a customer service powerhouse. In this interview, we discuss what he did and the lessons he learned.
Adam Ramshaw, Consultant to fortune 500 companies on Customer Experience	Adam Ramshaw, a customer experience consultant with Genroe, explains the relationship between continuous improvement and customer experience.

Leadership Interviews
Aza Raskin, Author, Startup Founder, and Son of Mac Inventor Jef Raskin	This is a multi-part Interview with Aza Raskin, on the Humane Interface. He discusses Agile Software Engineering. Then, in a later interview Aza Raskin discusses the "infinite scroll" approach to Google search results. In part 3, Aza Raskin shares his thoughts on Feature Bloat (aka, "Featuritis") and how to overcome it. In part 4, Aza Raskin describes the concept of Quasimodal Design and how to implement it in our software projects. Finally, Aza Raskin explains the role of Poka Yoke in the User Experience and why Lean should be applied to software engineering and knowledge work in general.
Mary Poppendieck, Author and codifier of Lean for Software Engineering	In this multi-part interview with Mary Poppendieck, the pre-eminent evangelist and teacher for Lean for Software, explains Lean Software Engineering. Then, Shmula.com readers were able to ask her questions of their own - read them here as Mary Poppendieck’s Answers to ALL Readers’ Questions, which includes questions such as Should Lean be Top-down or Bottom-up?. Then, another Interview with Mary Poppendieck. Then, Another interview with Mary Poppendieck where she explains Lean Software Engineering to a Lean Six Sigma audience. Plus, here's the Original Article to Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything. Finally, Mary considers the idea of "handoff" and how that's such a big problem in software projects - Mary Poppendieck on the Handoff and Waste
Gauri Nanda, Entrepreneur and inventor of Clocky	The inventor of Clocky, Gauri Nanda, shares with us her thoughts on innovation and the birth of Clocky
Gretchen Rubin, Author and evangelist of Happiness	In March 2010, I held a 2 part series of interview with Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness Project. Her answers to reader's questions on a variety of topics centering on happiness will enlighten you. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, shares with us here thoughts on how to be happy and what our part is in choosing to be happy. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, answers questions on happiness. This is Part 1 of 2. And, In part 2 of 2, Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness project answers more questions on how to be happy.
Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow	Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Zillow, shares with us his thoughts on this interview with Zillow back in June 2006.
Josh Coates, Entrepreneur and Startup Guy	Josh Coates, the founder of Mozy, shares with us jokes and the innovation behind Mozy.
Lloyd Hildebrand, Physician, Entrepreneur, and Enemy of Preventable Diseases that cause Blindness	Lloyd Hildebrand describes Diabetic Retinopathy and how his company, Inoveon, a Telemedicine Company, aims to eradicate diabetic retinopathy.
Ryan Kiskis, Gamer, Product Director, World of Warcraft	Ryan Kiskis of xFire, the developer of World of Warcraft, explains his thoughts on innovation.
Brian Hansen, Product Director, Kaboodle, the first pinterest	Kaboodle, was clearly the predecessor to Pinterest. We learn about Kaboodle and the innovation behind it.
Mark Jen, Product Manager, Guy who was fired from Google	Mark Jen, VP of Product Management at Plaxo, a Contact management company, the predecessor to Linkedin speaks to us about innovation and the business of business networking.
Samuel Adams, Community Director and expert on all things word of mouth	Bzzagent, the word of mouth marketing company, explains the power of the buzz.

The post Interview with Matt Long on the Herman Miller Performance System appeared first on shmula.

I don’t know how I ended up on some companies list of people to contact for questions on eCommerce Fulfillment Operations. Most of the time, the inquiries are more annoying than interesting, but this time the inquiry was actually very interesting.

This company sent me a list of questions to consider. I didn’t answer them, but I thought I’d share those questions here. It is clear that whoever this company is, they are interested in specific warehouse management metrics for ecommerce fulfillment.

Here are my observations, based on the questions that they asked me:

• Whoever this company is, they are interested in reducing lead time from company to customer. But, also interested in reducing lead time from supplier to company.
• The company is interested in logistics issues such as the last day to order for guaranteed arrival by Christmas day. And, interested in what is different this year than from last year.
• These questions were especially interesting: this company is interested in multi-item orders and their characteristics. You don’t get that often. I found this interesting. This company clearly understands the unique difference between single item orders and multi item orders. Not many folks outside of fulfillment operations understands the subtle nuances.

Below are the survey questions. What do you think? Is this just another company trying to better understand their competitors or a company truly trying to improve by understand benchmarks? I think it’s a company truly trying to improve, but also wanting to learn from other companies in the eCommerce Fulfillment space.

1. The following is a very short survey about your peak-season shipping and fulfillment performance last year vs your peak-season shipping and fulfillment goals for this year. All information is confidential and will be reported in aggregate only. It will take less than five minutes to complete. Thank you for your participation
2. Do you have intimate knowledge of the key metrics related to your company’s peak-season online shipping and fulfillment metrics, including last year’s performance and this year’s goals?
3. Do you have budget responsibility for your company’s online shipping and fulfillment capability?
4. Average number of days to process (order to shipper) multi-item orders
5. Average number of days to ship (shipper to customer) for multi-item orders
6. What was the last day to order for guaranteed arrival by Christmas last year? What do you expect it will be this year?
7. What was the percentage of multi-item orders that arrived on time last year? What do you estimate it will be this year?
8. What was the single biggest challenge to delivering multi-orders on time during peak season (Cyber Monday to Christmas Eve) last year? Select only one.
   • left the dc too late and shipping was not upgraded
   • carrier fault
   • non guaranteed shipping method (smartpost, surepost)
   • did not hae the inventory
9. What specific investments, if any, have you made to improve your peak-season delivery of online orders?
10. What is the single most important investment you have made in the past 12 months to improve your peak-season delivery of online orders?
11. What is the biggest shipping- and fulfillment-related tactic your competitors could pursue that would negatively impact your holiday sales this year?

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This is a two-part post that I’ve entitled “Book of Mormon Printing Press – Meet the Mormons”. Earlier this year, we went to Palmyra New York to see early Mormon history. I’d like to show a few pictures and a video about that trip and the very complicated process of typesetting and printing the first Book of Mormon. Before I show you a video of the printing press of the original Book of Mormon, I’d like to first discuss is a movie I recently saw entitled “Meet the Mormons” – a very good and inspiring movie.

Meet the Mormons

I’m a Mormon. The movie showcases the lives of 5 Mormon families. What I love about the movie is that it is so real and down-to-earth and really shows what Mormon families are like. It turns out we’re like most people who have challenges, sometimes struggle, and yet our faith helps us through it all and it knits us together. I strongly suggest you check out the movie. Go see Meet the Mormons.

Visiting The Book of Mormon Printing Press

During Spring Break of 2014 while we were living in Nashville, we decided to hit a few of the Mormon Church History Sites. We went to Palmyra New York and visited the E.B. Grandin building, the place where the original Book of Mormon was printed. There, we learned about the fascinating process of typesetting and how complicated it was to print the first Book of Mormon.

I didn’t know much about typesetting before this trip, but I now have such a respect for the original printers and how much work they went through so that the rest of us can have the blessing of books in general. I’m going to share several photos from that visit to the printing press – I’ll do my best with the labels since I don’t remember what the tools were called or what they were used for.

This was a press to keep the pages glued together:

This was leather used for the book front and back covers:

This is where the typesetting tiles would go into:

These were the tiles being prepared for typesetting:

These are ink balls for typesetting:

Print Proof of Book of Mormon:

Gluing the pages of the Book of Mormon:

This is a plane used to trip the edges of the Book of Mormon:

Here’s another press that glues the pages together:

This is where they stamped a gold trim on the pages of the Book of Mormon:

Another stamping tool for Book of Mormon:

Large press to squeeze the pages of Book of Mormon together:

Below is a short video showing how the original Book of Mormon was created back in the 1800’s:

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I think folks in continuous improvement and practitioners of lean and six sigma would do well to learn and apply the tools of qualitative research and ethnography. Far too often, I hear a propensity toward the quantitative and not enough about the qualitative methods to solve real world problems. We need to shift the tide toward the qualitative. Why? Let me explain.

An Example Where Ethnography Trumped Quantitative Data

I was involved once with a manufacturing company where arguably the most important process step in production had 2 glaring problems: (1) it had become the bottleneck and (2) it was the process step responsible for the majority of the quality defects in the finished good product.

Of course the firm had gotten the involvement of its Six Sigma Black Belts to no avail. So, I stepped in. It took no more than 1 day to identify what the root causes were for the specific problem.

Here’s what I did: I observed the work of all 3 shifts. I looked for the following:

• What’s “normal”? In other words, what is ordinary? You see, nothing people do is “natural”, so everything you observe could have happened a different way.
• What’s obvious? How did a state of affairs become obvious? That’s a great place to start.
• I focused on the entire activity, not just its steps. The operative word here is “entire”. For instance, take the act of “Feeding your Family”. That’s the entire activity. But, within that there are rings of context, or sub activities, such as: prepare food; set the dinner table; invite everyone to dinner; eat; put away plates and dishes; clean dishes; clean table. Those are all rings of contexts that comprise the activity of “Feed your Family”. So, in observational research, it’s important to keep context in mind while observing actual behavior.

Want to know what I observed?

In this particular process, the operators have access to various tools to do their work. I noticed that operators in every shift I observed got bored at some point, fell behind, and then tried to catch up in order to make their production numbers. Even more, those same operators used different tools in order to do their work.

• We know that humans are the most curious creatures on earth. Why were they getting bored?
• Was there a reason why one operator used Tool A, but another operator used Tool B for the same task? Was there a difference in performance or in the end product?

Notice how these questions are likely not questions that a Lean guy or a Six Sigma Black Belt would even consider. But they should.

So, What was the Root Cause?

In combining good old fashioned qualitative research with the 5 Whys, I discovered a few things:

• When the process upstream slowed down, it impacted the productivity of operators in this cell.
• Then, they found themselves bored. Which led them to find other work to do in order to stay busy.
• But then when work came, they found themselves doing other non-production work and they had to stop and re-start on production work.
• Often times, they had to work faster to catch-up.
• It turns out that when the cell workers worked on non-production work, that work required other tools. But when they restarted on production specific work, they went ahead and used the tool that was already in their hand (we’re talking about an adjustable wrench versus a socket wrench). Both tools does the same thing, but a socket wrench is much easier to use and produces less fatigue. But, for non-production work, an adjustable wrench was required.

So, what was the countermeasure?

We got the line to produce based on Takt. Then, we standardized the toolkit used.

What A Lean Guy Would Do

Yes, a Lean guy would have arrived at the conclusion that I did. But, there’s a difference: My emphasis was on why something was happening and then finding the right solution for the problem. A typical Lean guy would go around finding ways to apply tools.

Make sense?

Ethnography versus Genchi Genbutsu

First off, formal qualitative research and ethnography – a specific type of qualitative research technique – is different from Genchi Genbutsu. The concept of “go and see” in the Toyota Production System is an important principle, but isn’t an exact analogue to Ethnography. There’s more. Much more in good, ethnographic research.

Basics of Qualitative Research

One of the best ways to immerse yourself in your customers’ worlds and experiences is through qualitative research. It’s more than just getting at consumer language. Good qualitative research digs deeper – getting at the concept, why behavior occurs, why perceptions exist, and what the implications are to the client’s business.

Qualitative research is interactive. The more others participate in the process and the progress of the work, the more valuable its outcome will be.

Qualitative research lets consumers and customers describe their own experiences and feelings. Where words fail, qualitative research can come up with the tools and techniques to enable consumers to express themselves in as rich a manner as possible – in multiple dimensions, unfiltered by predetermined rules, industry lingo or categories.

Qualitative research implies an exploratory, curious, and probing interview. It involves both direct questioning and more indirect forms of inquiry to get at hard-to-articulate topics or feelings.

Sometimes the best way to let customers communicate with us is to get out in the world and look at what’s happening. Certain problems demand it. Think about these scenarios:

• How do you learn what goes on when a young mom feeds a little kid? You could ask – and learn what she thinks about. But if you watch, you’ll see things she never “thinks about” or is conscious of. Things that may drive her decisions (buying decision or otherwise) without her ever “thinking about” it.
• Watch several groups of people coming into a fast-food restaurant. Where do they go when they come in the door? Do some groups stay together, while others break up? Who walks up to the counter right away? Who hangs back? It won’t take long before you see patterns emerge – patterns that consumers probably can’t tell you about because they haven’t stood around watching and taking notes. Patterns that hold clues about how the architecture, signage, lighting and traffic patterns of the restaurant affect the customer experience.
• What about a guy who’s just come to a new Web site that sells things for his business? Can he find his way around? Does he get lost doing some things, while others are a breeze? Could he remember well enough to tell you? He’s got preferences, sure, but do they match up with his actual on-site behavior?
• Or, what about the new factory floor worker? Can he perform his job and use the tools he is taught to use? Do he or she naturally find shortcuts to the established standardized work? If so, does that mean there’s a better way to do it? If so, why didn’t the more seasoned workers find the shortcut first? What prevented them from doing so?

Whenever the research is about a process, an interaction between people, or an interaction between people and something in their environment, we know we can learn valuable things by observation that can’t be learned by talking.

Sometimes the way to communicate is by keeping quiet and letting people show you the answer.

The post Role of Ethnography and Qualitative Research in Problem Solving appeared first on shmula.

Today we feature a lean practitioner – Mikhail Kalinin. He resides in Russia and he helps organizations in Russia implement Lean. In today’s article, Mikhail shares a case study where he and his team implemented lean in a Russian factory and he shares with us the lessons-learned. Go here to read the Russian Version.

At one meeting, HR Director gave me a book by Jeffrey Liker “Dao Toyota” in which the author talks about the history of formation and development of the Toyota production system, the origin of unique culture of production – “Lean Production”, which has proven its advantage over such production culture as “Mass production.”

After reading this book, I wanted to implement this approach in a factory. To do this, I needed to get the approval of company’s CEO.
We agreed with HR Director that she would introduce “Lean Production” to CEO before I turn to him for approval of my desire. Imagine my surprise when at the beginning of one of the next meetings of directors, CEO said that he decided to adopt the approach “Lean production” throughout the company.

We purchased all books about lean manufacturing that were available on the Russian market and CEO asked department’s directors to read them and then teach their direct reports.

CEO decided to start implementing Lean manufacturing approach in the factory first, so the main amount of books was purchased and distributed in the factory. I asked my colleagues including shift supervisors to read the books. And we started to discuss material on a weekly basis. Week by week we were getting more understanding of the approach and how to apply it in our circumstances. In addition to books, I also studied everything related to this subject on the Internet.

By this time, I managed to get first supporters of Lean approach at the factory. We were working without consultants on our lean approach implementation and very quickly, it became obvious that we must create a unit that would undertake more work on the organization of the implementation of lean manufacturing. It was decided that we‘d find necessary people within our organization. And we managed to do it. One of the former shift supervisors headed this department. The department includes three more people: two – from HR department and one from IT department. We named this department “Lean Implementation department”. With the support and assistance of HR Director, we have managed to create a preliminary plan for the implementation of lean manufacturing in our factory. A key element of the plan was that all factory managers and specialists should take part in the preparation of the trainings and promote lean approach in the factory.

Lean Implementation Department staff with Production Manager and me participated in seminars, trainings and conferences on lean manufacturing, visited several companies that were implementing lean manufacturing. Head of Lean Implementation Department together with HR Department organized two visits of our managers and specialists to one of the enterprises.

The main result of these visits was that the number of lean approach supporters doubled. “Doubters” were able to see by themselves that this approach works, they were able to communicate directly and to ask questions people who were already implementing lean, and, what is more important, get answers.

Thus, by studying literature, attending seminars and conferences and, mainly, due to the visits of the enterprises which were already implementing lean manufacturing, the number of supporters among the middle and junior managers (shift supervisors, foremen), reached the number required for starting the deployment of lean manufacturing throughout the factory.

We started with teaching the basic principles and lean tools our middle managers (shift supervisors, chief engineer department staff). The main part of lean implementation culture was that we asked all managers to prepare and conduct training courses to their subordinates. We agreed, who will be responsible for training and implementation of a particular lean methodology or tool. Finally, almost all managers and factory specialists were involved in this process. We conducted only one external training. “Center Prioritet” experts conducted TPM training. It was very important that all works during the training was with the participation of the CEO. It proved to everyone that CEO is taking lean implementation at the factory very seriously.

After half a year, HR department and we have developed two main training programs: “School of world-class masters” for foremen and a similar program for operators. These programs have been designed to 9 and 12 months, respectively. During the training program, participants not only gain knowledge about lean manufacturing philosophy, concepts and tools, but also participated in team building trainings, project management, etc. Participants of the training program also had to develop and implement a project aimed on improving one of the processes using the knowledge gained during the program.

Participation in the program was not mandatory, but it was openly and clearly stated that successful fulfillment of the program will help to improve position at the factory or/and obtain an increase in wages.

Commission headed by Plant manager and HR director assessed the results of the education program. For two years of Lean production implementation, we achieved the following results:

• The number of product changeovers during a month of production has quadrupled.
• Changeover time has been reduced three times.
• Employees made about 80 suggestions for improving work and work places a year with savings more than 70 000 dollars.
• The availability of the equipment has reached 85%.
• Level of quality products without rework reached 99.87%.

For the company as a whole, this work has yielded the following results:

• Reduced cost of finished products inventory.
• Cost savings for the diversion of working capital in inventories.
• Reduce the backlog of customer orders from three to four times.
• Reduction of production costs.

One of the most important results was increased employees’ work satisfaction (from the polls), which has affected in reduced staff turnover.
Importantly, we found that Lean manufacturing approach really works for Russian enterprises and provide real and tangible results.

Important role in the success of lean approach implementation played compliance to the following principles:

• Leadership – persistence, perseverance and unity of word and deed.
• Respect for employees – creating a safe, comfortable working conditions, recognition and promotion of the achieved result.

Conclusions

1. Implementation of “Lean Production” approach gives significant positive results in the work of the enterprise.
2. Approach requires introduction and performing of at least seven conditions. (Pic. 1).
3. Implementation requires a systematic approach, the development of implementation methodology, training, motivation systems.
4. It is necessary to interact, primarily with HR Department. It is better if the lead of implementation will take HR Department.
5. Significant results in improving of operation is possible to receive immediately after the start of implementation, cost savings can be partially used to finance the deployment of the program implementation.
6. If it is not possible to establish a structure within the organization to help in lean production implementation, I recommend using consultants with clear requirements for the results of their work.

About Mikhail Kalinin

Mikhail has more than 20 years’ experience in manufacturing and supply chain operations. He has worked with multinational companies such as Colgate-Palmolive, Benckiser, Frito Lay, 3M and with Russian companies. He managed to build and run four plants from zero level, develop teams, which delivered expected results. During his work, he managed to learn and implement KPI’s systems, 6 Sigma, Lean Production approaches which helped to significantly increase productivity, quality and reduce costs. He believes that Lean thinking should change Russian companies from poor productivity to world class performance. From 2010, he works as a consultant, helping companies to increase productivity, improve quality and reduce costs and production time. And we are succeeding in our way to continuous improvement.

You can contact Mikhail here:

Lean Union
www.leanunion.ru
kalinin@leanunion.ru
+7 916 6824127
Mikhail Kalinin

The post Support from Human Resources is Critical in Lean: A Russian Case Study (English) appeared first on shmula.

This article explains the waste of overprocessing and how it impacts the customer experience. I also show how overprocessing is conveyed using a customer journey map, which you can download at the end of the article.

Other 7 Wastes Articles

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Don't Improve a Process That Shouldn't Exist Overproduction and the Environment 7 Wastes and the Practice of Law 7 Wastes of Software Development 7 Wastes and the Environment 7 Wastes in the Office 7 Wastes in a Call Center 7 Wastes in Affiliate Marketing 7 Wastes of Paid Search Marketing Wastes Hide in Plain Sight 7 Wastes of Human Resources Symbiotic Relationship between 7 Wastes Osama Bin Laden and the 7 Wastes Information Overload is Waste Overprocessing is Everywhere

I once heard a story about a husband who buys his wife flowers every year for their wedding anniversary. This husband goes to the same flower shop to buy his flowers. When this husband asked the flower shop owner about how business was going, the flower shop owner responded

Buying flowers for your wife has nothing to do with flowers. It has everything to do with marriage extension. The marriage extension business is booming.

In this husband’s mind, it was just a business of selling flowers. In the flower shop owner’s mind, buying flowers for your wife for a wedding anniversary is about extending your marriage. That. is. a. big. difference.

It’s More Than Perspective

It’s more than just how we look at things. Let me tell you another story to illustrate.

A few weeks ago, I took one of my kids to the doctor’s office. It seems like whenever I go to the doctor’s office, I repeat the same information that I know I’ve already given. You see, with as many kids as I do (I have 9 children), I’m at the doctor’s office A LOT.

Why am I asked the same set of questions everytime I’m at the doctor’s office?

Waste of Overprocessing

One observation I have is that the waste of overprocessing is literally everywhere. Most times, we expect it and we just deal with it. On the one hand, the most harm providing answers that we know we’ve already given is annoyance. But, could there be more psychological harm than we think?

Let’s take a common situation in our economy: losing your employment. getting fired. losing your job. Now, psychologically, when someone loses their job – especially if that person has a family to support – can be very stressful. So, that person has left the ranks of the employed to the ranks of the unemployed. He’s now a job seeker.

Let’s walk through the journey of a job seeker. As I walk you through his journey, I want you to notice the subtle but very important difference between a customer journey map approach versus the value stream map or even a process map.

Customer Journey of a Job Applicant

Customer Persona

Let’s call our job applicant “Peter”. He lives in Detroit and earns an income of $45,000 USD per year. He’s married with 3 kids and has a bachelor’s degree in business management. One concern that is top of mind for him is that he feels a strong burden to support his family. He’s willing to do anything – get any job – to be able to support his family.

Job Candidate Customer Journey

1. Peter has been out of work for a few days and feels pressure to financially support his wife and kids.
2. He’s worried about paying his bills.
3. But, he believes he’ll land a job that will allow him to support his family.
4. Peter looks on the internet for job openings that fit his background in his local area.
5. He finds a company with a job opening that he’s qualified for.
6. Pete creates an account on the company’s online applicant tracking system (ATS).
7. He uploads his resume.
8. But wait – Peter is asked to complete a form asking for the exact same information that is on his resume that he just uploaded.
9. Pete submits his resume, not knowing what the next steps will be.

On the face of it, it seems like a harmless enough process. If one created a value stream map, then the clear area for improvement would be to reduce or eliminate asking the job candidate the same information they he or she just entered by uploading their resume. But, that approach misses a critical area of improvement: the customer’s state of mind.

Peter is stressed. Asking him to enter the same information he just entered doesn’t help him feel better. If we remove the irritation, that will help.

But, he’s still stressed.

This can be an opportunity to make a simple process that every candidate goes through actually a magical one.

How?

What if after Peter submits his online job application, the “Thank You” page has a one line sentence that said

“We know that the job search process can be stressful. Thanks for applying for this position with our company.”

Simple. But, it conveys empathy and this simple job application process could be turned into a potentially magical one.

This also marks one of the clear differences between a customer journey map and maps as used in Lean or Six Sigma.

Customer Journey Map Template Download

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I’m in San Antonio Texas today, visiting my good friend, Mark Roenigk. Mark and the team at Rackspace are doing some amazing things in the background that ultimately lead to improvements for the customer experience. As some of you may know, Rackspace headquarters is in a big shopping mall that they turned into their corporate office. It’s actually really cool.

Well, during our visit, we sat by a wall full of A3’s (I didn’t take a picture of the A3 wall – sorry). It was clear that Rackspace is using A3 thinking to thoroughly solve business problems and thereby ultimately improve the customer experience.

For those unfamiliar with A3 thinking, it’s simple. A3 is an approach to problem solving that is extensively used at Toyota. If you think of it, A3 Thinking is essentially Lean codified on an 11×17 piece of paper. The elements on the A3 are essentially Plan-Do-Check-Act. Now, I know what you’re thinking – super simple and simplistic, right?

Wrong.

Here’s why: it always takes 2 to A3.

What does that mean? Well, here’s the power of A3 thinking.

A3 Thinking as a Teaching Tool

It always takes 2 to A3 means that there’s a mentor and a student. The mentor is well-versed in A3 thinking and can help the student go through each step of PDCA in solving the problem at hand.

A3 Thinking as a Leadership Development Platform

Because there’s a mentor involved, this gives the student an opportunity to develop both as a problem solver and also a leader. As we all know, almost all solutions to problems involve some level of change management. And, change management is essentially leadership and influence. So, A3 thinking can help one develop as a leader.

A3 Thinking as a Problem Solving Approach

Now, the most obvious benefit from A3 thinking is its capability to help solve tough problems through the application of PDCA. I go through the details of how A3 thinking can help us solve tough problems and I even provide a free A3 Template Download here.

Honestly, explaining the A3 in a blog post won’t do it justice. But here’s what will.

Use A3 Thinking Today.

That’s right. Practice A3 thinking right now, but, well, actually doing it. That’s how you’ll learn. Practice over Theory. At least that’s what Taiichi Ohno believed.

A Real A3 From Toyota

To help you get on your way, watch the brief video below and download a free A3 Template – it’s an actual A3 from my time at Toyota. It’s pretty old, but still instructive. Note: I created this video a while ago and it might as well be an audio file, since I didn’t actually do anything with video. You’ll see. Anyways.

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Ever wonder why Toyoda was changed to Toyota?

Most people know that Toyota began as a company that manufactured looms – or, sewing machines. At that time, Toyota was knows as “Toyoda”, named after the founder, Sakichi Toyoda. It wasn’t until much later – 1936 to be exact – that Toyoda changed to Toyota. Most of us know this as fact, but few of us know why the name was changed. Keep reading to learn how.

Various sources tell a different story as to why the name was changed. According to the official Toyota explanation, the name was changed for 2 reasons:

1. Voiceless Consonants aren’t appealing

Apparently, in Japanese, the letter “D” in “Toyoda” is a voiceless consonant. This wasn’t viewed as appealing. A voiced consonant is preferred, so they chose to make it a “T”.

2. Jikaku and Good Luck

Jikaku is the practice of counting strokes in Kanji and Katakana. The number of strokes determine good and bad luck. “Toyota” has 8 strokes versus 10, and 8 is a number in Japan that is associated with good luck and fortune. So, the official record tells us that pretty much sealed the deal: change it from “D” to a “T”.

But, there are objections to this reason. Some people believe that the number 8 in Japan isn’t a big deal; while in China it is important. It’s hard to verify either of these claims, but is one prevailing objection out there.

There are other accounts of the name change that point to other reasons such appealing to an international audiences and international acceptance.

But, I have another theory.

Reduce Waste in the Toyota Name

Maybe. Just maybe. What if the folks at Toyota fundamentally wanted to reduce the number of strokes, but yet maintain the “Toyoda” name. What if they chose to do that and eliminated 2 strokes – from 10 strokes to 8. What if?

10 strokes to 8 strokes = 20% Reduction in Strokes!

It’s a stretch. But, hey, this is my addition to the folklore that’s currently out there.

Here’s another newsflash item for you. Consider the current Toyota logo. Now look below – did you know that it spells T-O-Y-O-T-A right there in the logo? Yeah, I didn’t either.

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Akio Toyoda the CEO and President of Toyota Motor Corporation dumps a bucket of ice water on his head to support and bring more awareness to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or more commonly known as Loou Gehrig’s Disease.

Watch the video below. He challenges executives at Nissan and respectfully bows after he dumps water on himself.

But, I have to wonder: why didn’t he standardize the ice bucket challenge and provide a visual management board in doing so?

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Do you walk the walk or are you all talk? Understanding Gemba and the true purpose of Gemba Walks is crucial. Gemba is “where the work is done” or better yet, the “real place.” A Gemba Walk then is just simply a “walk where it is done.” This process is simple and straightforward. It is intended to move leaders from the office or behind the computer out to where the action is, where the work is done. Many will immediately say “management by walking around” (MBWA). This is an old school concept and significantly broad. The fact is, leaders at all levels must be out where the work is done. Business does not get done behind a PC and effective leaders understand they must influence from Gemba, not in their office! Look at a leader that spends the majority of their work day behind a desk and you will see someone that is ineffective, out of touch and unable to drive their business. Harsh words maybe, but factual none the less. The process of Gemba Walks begins like any other business process. It must be understood, planned and conducted with specific intent.

We have defined what Gemba and Gemba Walks are, now let’s look at the elements that go into the process:

1. Plan the Walk: Be specific as to where and what the outcomes are to be achieved.
2. Go to the Gemba: Get out on the floor or in the business where business is done.
3. Understand the Process: Look for opportunity, waste, problems and seek patterns.
4. Show Respect: Engage the hearts and minds of the people by showing respect, relying on them, developing and challenging them.

One of the most crucial steps in the process is planning. Start your planning with understand what is to be accomplished. Be specific. Are you looking for achievements or areas of improvement? Break down the Gemba into parts or process and target a specific area. With these specifics identified, go into the Gemba Walk with focus, intent and respect for the people. While you are engaged in the Gemba Walk, be 100% engaged and do not allow distractions. Talking on the phone, responding to emails or texts and engaging in casual or personal conversations during the walk is disrespectful to the people and will distract you from seeing what is really going on in your business. You must have the mindset that there is no more important task you could be doing than the Gemba Walk.

After completing your Gemba Walk, real and visible action is required. By taking action, you are showing respect to the people and demonstrating that your conversations were meaningful. Gemba Walks that have no follow up or after action responses are considered useless. Keep the following steps in mind:
Spend time reflecting and capturing key takeaways from the walk.

• Prioritize and categorize your thoughts and findings.
• Use Pareto or Trend Charts for evaluations for your future walks.
• Document who you talked with and their comments.
• Provide feedback to other leaders and management.
• Follow up with individuals offering key insights or questions to keep the engagement going.

Getting the most out of Gemba Walks requires both planning and follow-up. Planning and execution are just as important as the post-walk follow-up.

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Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a crucial method in Lean Management. It is intended to analyze the current state, and design a future state, for a series of events that take a product from beginning to end. It also has supporting methods to analyze and design flow at the system level, across multiple platforms. Understanding that the method is primarily associated with manufacturing, it can also be applied in all service related industries, supply chain, logistics and healthcare industries, to name a few.

The value stream map must be useful. Managers and leaders should keep in mind the following questions when completing a VSM:

• Can you identify the purpose of the process?
• What is being done in the process?
• When is the process being done?
• Who is using the process?
• Where is the process being used?
• How is the process being done?
• How does the process measure up against your metrics?
• How long does the process take?

There are more questions involved obviously, but this is a great starting point to ensure you have a value stream map that is actionable. The value stream map is a representation of the flow, from supply to customer, through your organization as well as the flow of information. This enables you to see at a glance where the delays are in your process, any restraints and excessive. The current state map is the first step in working towards your ideal state for your organization.

We now require a vision of where we want to end up so that we can focus our efforts on achieving an agreed “ideal state.” A team should create an “ideal state” value stream map. This map illustrates the absolute best the process could be. This map should then be agreed to by senior management as the ultimate. Kanban systems could be utilized to remove the need for planning and scheduling as well as many other ideas that could be considered. You can plan to achieve your shared vision of where the process needs to be; the simplest way to do this is to plan a series of improvements and use your value stream map to communicate what you want to do.

The value stream map is a crucial tool in the Lean methodology. Understanding the principles, usage and creation is an important skill that practitioners should master.

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We define the word standard as “a level of quality or attainment.” In the practice of the Lean methodology, that carries significant weight and high expectation. When you carry that thought process further to the healthcare industry, the act “setting a standard” carries with it very high expectations of knowledge and practice that impacts the life and health of patients. So, when we refer to setting the standard for Lean Quality in Healthcare, one person comes to mind immediately.

Mark Graban is the person we look to for setting the highest standard and example in Lean for Healthcare. Mark has elevated his expertise to the very top of Lean Healthcare practice. Through years of hard work, professional development and educational achievement, Mark has tirelessly forged his craft and become a master or expertise in his practice. His educational achievements include a BS in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University, an MS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from MIT. Mark’s professional resume includes work in several industries, including automotive, technology and industrial products, along with healthcare.

His strength, knowledge and expertise has allowed Mark to become an award winning author, consultant and keynote speaker. His book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety and Employee Engagement will have its third edition released this year and earlier editions have been translated into eight different languages.

Mark is now forging a new opportunity with a dynamic change simulation program. As a certified facilitator of this interactive program called ExperienceChange, Mark is able to take executives, managers and change agents in healthcare and have them experience a year of organizational change in a one day session.

He has several ExperienceChange seminars coming up:

San Antonio — January 27, 2016
Dallas/Fort Worth — March 15, 2016

Register for his seminars here.

According to Mark:

“Many Lean initiatives struggle or fail. Why? One reason is due to a lack of change management. Organizations that properly define a strategy for Lean, engaging leaders and employees, and communicating better will be more successful. This interactive workshop, with its innovative computer simulation and case study, will allow you to learn and practice change management practices in a safe environment – getting a year’s worth of change management experience in just one day.”

To learn more about Mark, visit his website.

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It is said that performance is related to housekeeping and workplace organization. It is a first step to improving operating results. The 5S Tool is a common sense approach to improve the visual control in the workplace. The decision-making process usually comes from a dialogue about standardization, which builds understanding among employees of how they should do the work. It can apply to both manufacturing and the service setting.

The term 5S is an abbreviated reference to five Japanese words that control workplace organization and housekeeping. Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu and Shitsuke make up the 5S Tool. Taking it a bit further, we would define them into the following 5 words:

Housekeeping – Dispose of or remove the unnecessary items from the shop floor. The unnecessary collect dirt, get damaged, get lost or create unsafe situations.

Organization – Needed items must have a quick and accessible place at the work station. All items should have a standardized place. There is a place for everything and everything in its place.

Clean Up – Process discipline is reinforced by cleanliness. It shows respect for the workers by management and enforces a defined process.

Cleanliness – Continuous cleaning means you are always ready. If cleaning is continuous by all, there is never a dispute on who is responsible. Create a clear responsibility and leave no place untouched.

Discipline – Rules must be clearly communicated and strict accountability must be held. Quality will be improved with proper discipline in cleanliness.

Decreasing distractions in the workplace is the best description for the 5S Tool. The tool positively affects and influences every part of the process and worker performance. It is understood with 5S, you will never see a plant that runs well being dirty and disorganized. Likewise, you will never see a dirty and disorganized plant run well.

The 5S system is a great place to start for all improvement efforts across a business platform. The 5S Tool is especially attractive to older manufacturing facilities who are seeking to make significant improvements in quality.

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