Today I ran across an article titled Black Swan Alert: Low Tech Links Devastate High Tech Supply Chains that I feel requires a response.  The article cites Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, as a way to take a shot at lean, just-in-time supply chain management practices that seem to be gaining favor:

A solution proposed by Dr. Taleb and others is to build a robust system (in this case supply chain) with redundancies and disaster recovery processes to properly manage extreme event risk…

This article makes two important points.  First, Dr. Taleb is right–leaning out a supply chain in a way that presumes that we live in a stable, predictable environment should not be accepted as an optimal business practice.  Second, many companies seem to be optimizing for “normal times” in the name of going lean.

But this is not what going lean is about.

It is important to understand that lean, just-in-time practices  far more than what they seem to be on the surface. They are about far more than optimizing inventory for predictable conditions.  Fortunately there are some in this business who seem to understand.  I ran across an article in Outsource  that points out why lean must be more than simply a means of applying what is seen on the surface at a manufacturing organization…

In his book Going Lean, author Stephen Ruffa cites standouts such as Walmart and Southwest Airlines as pioneers in adopting Lean to combat a turbulent business environment. The lesson here is that even when external forces are restless, companies can weather the storm by adhering to the stabilising forces of a Lean culture.

I must admit that I have become concerned about the direction of this lean movement as a whole.  Lean was originally employed as a means for companies to overcome their unpredictable operating environments–and thus, this approach is well suited to managing within the extreme turbulence that has become the norm for businesses everywhere.  Too often, however, this powerful approach is relegated to implementing a discrete set of tools and techniques, offering only modest benefits rather than the competitive advantage it has been shown to produce (see A Roadmap to Success or a Lesson in Map Reading?)

For those who wish to learn about how lean principles can be used to slash costs, promote innovation, and overcome the risks created by operating in uncertain, dynamic conditions (known as lean dynamics), I provide a history, a description, along with cases showing how it is used in my book Going Lean: How the Best Companies Apply Lean Manufacturing Principles to Shatter Uncertainty, Drive Innovation, and Maximize Profits.  I subsequently wrote The Going Lean Fieldbook: A Practical Guide to Lean Transformation and Sustainable Success to break this down further into a framework to support an action plan.

Over the past couple of months I had the opportunity to participate in our political process by advising a candidate seeking to serve on the school board for one of the nation’s largest school systems.  My central focus? You guessed it: applying “lean” principles to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of K-12 education. The need is clear. Like many others, this school system faces the challenge of providing greater services to its expanding student population during a time of budget tightening. It was great to see how quickly this candidate grasped the fundamentals of lean, embracing its potential for increasing efficiency as a realistic alternative to the traditional cost cutting methods the school board had recently taken: slashing educational programs, freezing teachers’ pay, and increasing class sizes.

I was heartened to see that a similar message of greater efficiency and transparency was central to other candidates’ promises, and was quickly picked up by their opponents. But after the ballots were counted, the rhetoric quickly changed–particularly when those candidates who initiated this emphasis were defeated. Many of the newly elected officials did not attend the meeting in which seated officials sought to quickly settle the issue using limited, narrowly focused actions with as little analysis and fanfare as possible–with some characterizing meaningful efficiency changes as nothing more than unrealistic election year hype.

This lightning-speed progression through the entire lifecycle of lean offers a powerful example of what often happens to improvement efforts within large institutions of all sorts. What begins as lofty promises of far reaching advances ultimately degrades into narrowly-focused projects. Its analytic basis is replaced by anecdote-driven actions. And the results are predictably unremarkable, yielding marginal gains that are soon forgotten.

What can be done? Let’s look to the words of Thomas Jefferson who stated: “…whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” So we the people must educate ourselves in the art of the possible–and then hold our government accountable for taking the right actions.  Today’s top corporations–firms like Southwest Airlines–demonstrate that services need not be cut or fees raised when the organization encounters unexpected headwinds. These “lean” firms demonstrate that it is possible to continue to provide top value–even continue to innovate new offerings–when times are tough.

Shouldn’t we demand as much for our children whose education clearly holds the keys to our nation’s future?

You can learn more about how lean principles are transforming service oriented organizations of all sorts from my books Going Lean and The Going Lean Fieldbook–and from archived articles in this blog!

This morning I stumbled on an interesting article titled Need a good idea? Brainstorming won’t help. It caught my attention for two reasons.  First, because it brings a powerful perspective to the topic of stimulating workforce creativity–a key element of going lean.  Second, it is counterintuitive; it argues strongly against the what has become the primary approach that so many lean consultants bring to corporations–pulling together workers for brainstorming events to identify areas to attack waste.  This generally results in a whiteboard of ideas that are fairly easy to address, but many may have little impact on the bottom line (particularly within a large, complex business operating in a dynamic environment–precisely where it is most often applied).  

What, then, is the right approach?  This article points out that much greater benefit comes from bringing people together to identify a single point for them to focus on, and then sending them to work on their own to develop ideas for a solution: 

Such focused questions result in unique answers because you’re forced to respond to a particular issue.

This is precisely what Toyota and other benchmarks of lean do.  As I describe in The Going Lean Fieldbook: A Practical Guide to Lean Transformation and Sustainable Success, these organizations did not pursue waste reduction led by a meandering set of brainstorming events.  Instead, they targeted clear transformational focal points that would advance their overall maturity in attaining specific, desired outcomes. 

How can a company get started?  Read more in my post, The Need for Conducting a Dynamic Value Assessment.