How lean are the Detroit Three today?  Really.  Is it great “Lean Thinking” or just good lean manufacturing?

It appears that much has changed in recent years at the former “Big Three” automakers. On the plus side, a recent report in Industry Week seems to point to a great deal of “leanness” at GM, Ford, and Chrysler.  Data in Richard Schonberger’s book, Best Practices in Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement, and in other sources, backs up the claim that “The Detroit Three”, as they are popularly referred to today, are every bit as lean as Toyota or Honda.  Still, there are some disturbing blemishes on this pretty lean picture.  The bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler, and the ascendency of Toyota to become the world’s largest carmaker, are the most glaring examples.  One can also point to the near destruction of lean at Chrysler by Daimler, as reported by Jeff Liker in The Toyota Way, the end of the Toyota/GM NUMMI joint venture, and the death of the Saturn brand.

Right now, it is a mixed scorecard.  There are some very strong examples of lean manufacturing execution among the Detroit Three.  But Lean Thinking?  True embedding of lean in the fabric of what every employee does every minute of every day?  True buy-in at the seniormost levels of leadership?  My conclusion?  Not quite.  Not yet.

As a lean consultant, I get a huge amount of fulfillment from my job.  I help people get results with lean.  I get to work with some outstanding companies, teams, and lean practitioners all over the world.  I also get to see lean applied across the full range of industry and organization types, and I have an enormous amount of variety in my work.  I wouldn’t trade it for anything. 

In over a decade and a half of working with lean principles and methods, I had never been back to consult in my boyhood home in Detroit.  That is, up until early 2007, when I was asked to conduct a couple of kaizens in Dearborn.  It was on one of these trips that I had one of the most pivotal discussions of my life.  It completely changed my impressions of what culture change means.  It also built a very strong “BS filter” for everything I hear coming out of Detroit these days about “lean transformation”.

In June of 2007 I walked into a Mongolian grill restaurant down the street from my hotel.  I sat at the bar with a glass of bad wine, my dinner, and a book.  I just wanted to get in and out and get ready for the next day of the kaizen event.  Halfway through my meal, a woman sat down two bar stools away.  She reached over for the ashtray next to me and held it up.

“Do you mind?” She asked.

Actually, I did mind.  I minded a lot.  But then, I shouldn’t have taken a seat at the bar, should I?  Instead, I just grunted some politeness and went back to my Kung Pau something-or-other.

After a minute or two, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that she was looking at the cover of the book my nose was buried in.  “Lean Thinking…Thinking Lean….  What’s that about?”  Shoveling another pea pod in my mouth, I held the book out toward her.  Her lips moved as she squinted to read the subtitle, “Banish waste and create wealth in your corporation.”

“Oh,” she said.  She settled back in her barstool and took another drag off her cigarette.  “My company could use some of that.”

Now, at this point, any consultant worth his salt would have seamlessly jumped in with a business card and a smooth sales pitch.  Not me.  Not that night.  All I wanted to do was finish my dinner in peace, get back to my hotel room, and recharge my batteries for the Wednesday of a week-long kaizen.

“Oh, yeah?”  I shoved the rice in my mouth to one side.  “Who do you work for?”

“Chrysler.”

Okay.  Now.  She.  Had.  My.  Attention.  Don’t scare her off.  No sudden moves. 

I gently closed my book and took a big gulp of wine to wash back the much-too-big bite I had taken.

“Really.”  I paused.  “So, tell me what it’s like to work there.”

Well, the flood gates opened up.  Over the next half hour, she told me about working on the production line at Chrysler.  Actually, it was more like not working on the production line.  You see, for almost a full year, this woman had been in the Jobs Bank.  If you haven’t ever heard before of this travesty of inhumanity, imagine high school detention as an adult. In this woman’s case, hundreds of employees “freed up” from productive work, coming in to the Jobs Bank each day, and being paid almost full wages for sitting in a gutted out cafeteria, watching TV, reading a book, or simply doing nothing.  You can read more about it here.  She said at first she signed up to do light filing, volunteer to Habitat for Humanity, and take some college courses.

I asked her what it was like working on the line.  She said she loved it.  She loved building cars.  Her whole family worked building cars, and she loved it.  She said she loved the people she worked with.  And her boss.  It was hard work, but she got satisfaction out of it.  She had been on the line for a little over a year when she got laid off and put in the Jobs Bank.  I tried to imagine what that was like, but couldn’t.

“How did you feel when you went into the Jobs Bank?” I asked.

She paused for what seemed like a long time.  She looked at her hand playing with the cigarette against the edge of the ashtray.

“I cried,” she finally said.  “I cried every day for weeks.  A lot of people cried.”  She looked up and I could see the bottom of her eye start to glisten.  “I missed my friends.  I missed the work.  But, you know, after a while, I got used to it.  I got a kid at home to support.  I need that job.”

The discussion left me stunned.  In the dark, I drove past the Ford World Headquarters on my way back to the hotel. 

I was struck by the transformation of a young, productive, engaged woman who got rewards and joy from her work.  She had turned into a person who would likely never get so emotionally or intellectually involved in any future job that she would be hurt like that ever again.  She had been quite thoroughly taught by The System that there is value in not working.  For her to survive her time in Chrysler’s Jobs Bank, she had to emotionally disconnect from everything around her.  She had been groomed, over a year of daily repetition, that this is what happens when a factory becomes more “efficient”.  Her experiences will probably affect her behavior in every job she ever has in the future.  Imagine how psychologically entrenched she will be against process improvement.

Are you picturing the culture change problem with this one person?  Now, multiply her by several thousand.  That’s how many people were “banked” across The Big Three this past decade.

Even today, over two years after that meeting, I still get choked up every time I relate that discussion.  As fulfilled as I feel in my work, there are others who have all fulfillment sucked out.  These are not valued, productive, engaged employees.  These are the opposite.  These are also not companies who truly “get it” with lean, or who really value their employees.  No true lean organization who really knew what was going on would create the irreversible psychological, emotional, and cultural scars that the Jobs Bank did.  No union that truly cared about competitiveness and the welfare of its members would make human beings pay union dues to be treated worse than prisoners in Gitmo.

Go to the Industry Week article I mentioned before.  Read it carefully.  How many times do you find the term “lean” in the article followed immediately by “manufacturing”?  You can find several terms numerous times, including “productivity”, “flexibility”, “factory floor”, and the like.  But how many times do you find “leadership”, “commitment”, “culture”, or “continuous improvement” in the article?

I have often felt that it would take a “near death experience” for the Detroit Three to turn around and truly become lean.  I don’t know about that anymore.  Even after bankruptcy, I still don’t see business leaders in Detroit “walking the talk”.  I still don’t hear the telltale language, either reported in the press, or from execs themselves, that says that they are doing more than just good lean manufacturing. 

When the financial crisis is over, we’ll see who is still in church.  For now, I see the Detroit Three in the pews, but they are not up at the altar.  And it is going to take more than a few years to undo the culture and human damage that has been done by decades of backwards thinking.

The Northeast Region Shingo Prize Conference, organized again this year by the Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership, was held October 7^th and 8^th in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Having just returned, I wanted to share some reflections on my favorite three keynote speakers, and some of their key points.

Sheriff John Rutherford: Lean-ing into Excellence

Sheriff John Rutherford of the Jacksonville, Florida Sheriff’s Office kicked off with a keynote describing the lean implementation he has been leading since 2003.  Rutherford understands that people are what drive lean success, and he described the steps he took to “create an organization where people want to achieve.”  His methods and leadership certainly get results.  Employee suggestions went from about three a year to more than a hundred.  All suggestions are responded to within 35 days, and Rutherford estimates that about half are implemented.

Sheriff Rutherford’s guidelines and advice that he shared with the 450 attendees in the audience apply to any leader at any level in a lean organization.  One of the anecdotes that really stuck with me was about vision.  Nearly every organization has a vision statement.  It is usually wallpaper in the lobby that everybody looks at and nobody really reads, understands, or lives. 

Also like most organizations, Rutherford’s group had numerous binders describing detailed regulations that attempted to define the acceptable actions in every conceivable circumstance.  (Does this sound familiar, anyone?)  In the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office under Rutherford’s leadership, everyone lives by four simple core values.  The Sheriff told his officers that, “If you come into my office and convince me that your actions were supporting our four core values, you will stay out of trouble.”  With that simple statement, made with conviction and exemplified through his personal behaviors and engagement, everyone in the department not only understood the four values, but internalized them and let them govern their actions.  Over time, the reams of regulations were made irrelevant and redundant.  The organization was better aligned, morale was improved, and the organization became more customer-focused and efficient.

Obviously, organizations with traditional leaders and conventional approaches to human resources should take note of the simplicity, the elegance, and the respect for people in Jacksonville’s example.  Even organizations who are trying to become leaner through tools like Hoshin Planning (Policy Deployment) should take away one particular point of Sheriff Rutherford’s success: While Hoshin Kanri can help systematically link organizational strategy down through lower level actions in the organization, a simple, compact, well-considered vision, that is properly led, modeled, and supported, serves as a powerful and liberating guidance system for everyone.  It can do, through compassion and leadership, what volumes of restrictive and tedious written policies cannot.

David Mann: Standard Work – Process Focus for Creating a Lean Culture

David Mann is author of Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions.  The book was awarded the Shingo Prize in 2006.  It is one of my personal favorites and among the most valuable books read by lean companies with whom I regularly visit and work.  I had been looking forward to hearing him in person, and he did not disappoint.

Dr. Mann’s presentation centered on lean leadership, and the senior leader’s role in reinforcing new thinking and new practices.  Mann points out that most of the hurdles with lean are not centered on using new and unfamiliar lean tools – it is rather about creating a new mindset.  As he explained, “In lean, it’s not rearranging the furniture on the shop floor that’s hard; it’s rearranging the furniture between your ears that’s hard.”

David went on to describe a model for lean management and tools that can help.  Most were straight out of his book.  If you haven’t picked up a copy, I highly recommend it. 

Lean is not about tools or templates.  Really, it is not even about eliminating waste.  That definition is too specific.  Lean is, at its heart, a problem-solving system.  However, in order to work, the system must become part of the culture of the organization.  Changing culture is a responsibility that rests solely with the leader.  It cannot be denied and it cannot be delegated.  Leader standard work drives the accountability for daily behaviors that, in turn, drives the culture of continuous improvement that, in turn, drives the problem-solving system.  As a byproduct, this system eliminates the waste, satisfies the customers, and generates the results.  The key link in this chain is the problem-solving system.

Steven Spear: Chasing the Rabbit – Leading World Class Organizations

Steven Spear is a Senior Lecturer at MIT.  How well can a Senior Lecturer lecture?  At a typical conference where nearly everyone speaks from PowerPoint slides, when Steven Spear just walks around, looks you in the eye, and explains concepts in a way that you hang on every word, you know you’re listening to something special.

Spear authored the award winning book, Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition.  The anecdote he told during his keynote that completely riveted my attention was described in his book.  It was an exchange between Hyman Rickover, founder of the Navy’s Nuclear Power Propulsion Program, and Theodore Rockwell, who worked on the nuclear propulsion program with Rickover.

Rickover berated Rockwell for not knowing how the meeting Rockwell was going to hold shortly would conclude.  Rickover was not expecting Rockwell to see into the future, or to read minds.  Rather, he wanted Rockwell predict what a successful meeting outcome would look like so he would be able to recognize when something in the meeting went off track, and then be able to determine the root cause of the deviation.  Without a standard, Rickover was effectively saying, there can be no identification of deviation from a desirable outcome and, therefore, no improvement of the system, in this case the design of a nuclear submarine.

As Spear notes, there has never been a loss of life or a documented incident in over 50 years of U.S. naval nuclear power.  We could safely conclude that what Rickover and his project team did, they did right.  Lean practitioners in the room may have heard the voice of Taichi Ohno whispering to them as they heard Spear’s story: “Without a standard, there can be no improvement.” 

This is an anecdote that goes right to the heart of Lean Thinking.  It instantly became one of my favorite stories to help explain lean, and I can’t wait to share Spears’ insightful find with others.  What I especially appreciated was that it is not about the Toyota Production System and not about manufacturing.  It is more about standard work, process focus, and continuous improvement – some of the principles at the true heart of lean.  It underscores how lean principles really do apply to everything.  Everywhere you find a process, there is an application for lean.  It does not matter if you are assembling a car like millions of others or designing a nuclear submarine that the world has never seen before.  Lean works.

Over the last decade, television has had an ongoing love affair with the “reality show.”  One of the more popular reality formats is the turnaround.  The formula is consistent.  It features a disastrously misguided individual / homeowner / family / businessperson.  In the home/business turnaround versions of the format, film crews go in (often in hazmat suits) and poke their long lenses everywhere, just as we would poke our nosey noses into every frightening corner of the current state if we were there.  Next, the turnaround specialist arrives, looks around the scene and questions a bit, in TV’s abbreviated version of “Five Why’s”.  Usually there is some tipping point, where things look like they might not work out.  In nearly every case, though, the turnaround takes hold.  The future state is achieved.  We exhale a sigh of relief as the credits roll and a commercial plays for the next episode.

The number of reality turnaround formats have mushroomed.  There are at least half a dozen home improvement / decorating / cleanup versions out on the street.  Personal styling and wardrobe makeover shows are a perennial hit, with programs like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”, “Extreme Makeover”, and others.  British audiences have been feeding nightly off Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares”, and the franchise was transplanted to America.  Cable’s A&E Network has aired it’s version of the format, “Intervention”, for years now.  Even CNN aired a season of “The Turnaround”, in which a struggling small business owner is given a makeover and a new lease on business life.

I don’t typically watch a lot of reality TV, but I have sampled a few shows over the years.  I have noticed that all variations on the turnaround formula either show the actual hard work of the turnaround, or they don’t.  Usually they don’t. Producers know that we like our stories to have three neat parts: situation, tension, and resolution.  Editors know that they need to slash away miles of raw footage in order to satisfy our need for instant gratification.  They know we want to gawk at someone else’s messy life, catch a glimpse at what they were thinking, feel our hearts race at some hanging tension point, then see the “Big Reveal”…all in about 22 minutes. 

Only rarely do we see a reality TV turnaround show that accurately presents the hard work that goes into achieving and realizing the future state.  For example, take any episode of “Nanny 911″.  In this show, an Expert Nanny helps parents get control of a house gone mad.  Invariably, children’s poor behavior is traced back to the parents’ poor behavior, and Nanny must change the parents’ attitudes and beliefs if they are to behave in a different way and achieve any hope for sustained success.  In most cases, Mom or Dad clings tenaciously to their old beliefs and comfortable habits.  We have all seen the same type of stubbornness in similar real life situations – perhaps in ourselves.  Yet, in a miraculous turn, Nanny gets a dug-in parent to throw down their weapon and crawl out of their foxhole.  They have changed their thinking.  Everybody is happy.  The program reaches resolution.  All is right with the world.  We sit in mute amazement at the Expert Nanny’s skill.

Wait, though.  If you look closely at this point in the show you may occasionally see a continuity error.  Mom’s makeup now looks fresher.  The kids’ messy hair is suddenly not.  In one episode, I actually witnessed a Dad’s shirt change color!  What just happened?

In all likelihood, the show’s producers just stepped in to do the real, hard work of change.  While the cameras were off for a few hours, a team of psychologists worked the old folks over like they were inmates at Guantanimo Bay.  What ends up on the cutting room floor is real change leadership.

Reality turnaround shows are dangerous because they perpetuate a myth – the myth that simple, neat, and instant change miracles really do happen.  Television edits out the hours of messy, slow, laborious, frustrating work and leaves behind only the neat plotline and instant gratification we have come to expect from our TV.  Our televisions rarely show us undistorted reality.  They usually just tell us stories.  And in seeing those manicured stories repeatedly, it is easy and pleasant to believe that they are reality.  They are not.  Anyone who has been in a tough kaizen event with an entrenched team knows that there are no silver bullets to creating and sustaining a new behavior.  What we see is entertainment.  What we don’t see is the true face of change.

For example, on “Kitchen Nightmares”, Chef Gordon Ramsay hurls a stream of bleep-words at every episode’s incompetent chef while he confronts them with a plate of their own crappy food, often in front of guests and staff.  Ramsay karate chops them right in their overblown egos.  On more than one episode, the owner/chef storms out into the street, threatening never to return.  And yet, two minutes and two seconds later when we come back from commercial, they are all sorry-like, ready to repent and buy into Chef Ramsay’s plan.  Really?  Just like that?  No way. 

After that guy’s volcanic eruption, I’m sure at least one good change leader worked for hours to peel him off the ceiling, and get him all stitched up.  Then they sat down together.  They let him vent. They listened to him. They communicated. They got him to agree how miserable he and his staff are. They tried approaching him with an idea..then they backed away. They gave him space. They acknowledged him. They reframed the problem. The presented another idea. They listened some more. They presented the idea a different way. Someone cracked a joke and they all laughed. They involved him. They communicated again. They agreed on a plan. They listened yet again. …You get the picture.

Too often, lean transformation events look like a reality show.  Have any of your events come up short recently?  If your answer is “yes”, see if you can spot some any of these common failure modes:

·         Kaizen event leaders, team leaders, and their mentors may be well trained and very familiar with the business process to be improved or with lean techniques, but have little training or experience with human behavior and change leadership.

·         The kaizen event leadership focuses on the event week, with relatively little leader attention paid to preparation or planning on the front end, or the critical weeks and months that follow.  They are present during the event, but are nowhere to be seen afterwards.

·         Senior leaders are present and attentive at the management outbrief, but pay little attention afterwards.  Their “leader standard work”, critical to continuation of desired behaviors, is never established or is not sustained.

·         The kaizen event rushes to get results, but, in the process, ideas are not drawn out from team members, team members are poorly engaged, consensus on solutions is poorly built.

·         The team focuses on action items and a linear timeline, failing to circle back to check for team member agreement, address team member concerns, and maintain agreement on the move toward solutions.

How about your experiences?  Have you seen other examples of “Reality Show Kaizen”?