Igniting New Growth - My Improbable Journey, Part 1

Pascal Dennis, co-author of (Harnessing Digital Disruption)

Singapore, Toronto, San Francisco, Bangkok, KwaZulu-Natal, Auckland - all these are part of my improbable journey these past eight years. It all began with a delayed flight out of a Moroccan airport. It was the summer of 2017. I was sitting in the backyard with my wife, Pamela.

Laurent Simon, who would become my friend & business partner, was the one in Morrocco. He decided to send a LinkedIn note.

‘I like your books,’ he said. ‘We should write one together…”

‘About what?’ I asked.

“Harnessing digital disruption…”

Laurent Simon in San Francisco

As we chatted, I checked out Laurent’s LinkedIn profile: INSEAD business school, and impressive achievements in the cosmetics industry, management consulting & financial services. Head of Innovation leader at a major international bank. A smart guy.

‘I’m having a drink with my wife,’ I told him. ‘Maybe we can chat some more next week.’

And thus began our weekly WhatsApp calls. Laurent described his innovation work in the Asia Pacific region. I described my adventures in manufacturing, consumer goods, and health care. And the fun & business results my team & I had enjoyed working with a marvelous financial service company. Each week I would summarize what I’d learned in a mind map, which became part of our body of knowledge.

Laurent and I were natural disruptors, simpatico both professionally and temperamentally. I loved being a Strategy sherpa and mentor to senior leaders. But I was also a composer & leader of the Crazy Angels band. Laurent was a Renaissance man who swam effortlessly in multiple languages and cultures.

Pascal Dennis in San Francisco

Laurent lived in Singapore; I lived in Toronto. His environment was heat, humidity and rain. Mine was snow, ice and the cold wind sweeping down from Hudson’s Bay. We finally met in person in the fall of 2017 at a conference in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, where I was giving a talk. And that’s where we added another routine – long walks during which we would ‘shoot the breeze’. Soon after we began to have regular meetings in Singapore, Toronto and places in between.

We had both spent the previous decade helping companies transform their work, people and management systems. We’d both seen the power of the so-called Lean management system – the methods and mindset underlying the Toyota Production System. We understood that Lean represented a series of revolutions that had ‘changed the world’:

• Quality in the process – the realization that all work comprises a system of activities and information, and that the value chain will only work if each step was done right the first time
• Flow – understanding demand, capacity and the process in great detail; applying the laws of so-called production physics to maximize flow and minimize lead time and cost
• Continuous improvement – the realization that virtually nothing in the work is ‘fixed’, and that things like working content, sequence, layout, timing are all malleable and can be endlessly improved
• Leadership – the art of defining, deploying and executing a great aspiration in accord with a concise winning logic; how to build a learning infrastructure to supports, develops and deeply engages people
• ‘Customer in’ mentality – putting oneself in the customer’s shoes, and deeply understanding their needs and wants
• Strategy and decision-making – how strategy is developed and implemented; how we align and motivate disparate groups of people in complex organizations toward a shared Aspiration; how we make problems visible and deploy remedies; how we overcome the thorny problems of governance.

But Laurent and I differed on a critical point. He believed that Lean is essentially about protecting your core business, and not about igniting new growth. I disagreed: ‘Lean is also a growth strategy,’ I argued. It took a while, but I came around to Laurent’s point of view. Lean is necessary, but not sufficient. If it was, why were the business valuations of GAFA - Google, Amazon, Facebook (Meta) and Apple – higher than those the great industrial companies I revered? Had Toyota, Honeywell, Proctor & Gamble and the like lost their mojo? Certainly not – the great industrials were as strong as ever. Something was happening, and I was determined to find out what it was.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis




In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Year-End: Why Is Reflection So Difficult?
What is a Good Life?
All Systems Must Support Humanity – Including Lean
To Learn Corporate Strategy, Study the Military Masters

Year-End: Why Is Reflection So Difficult?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

'Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.'
Flatt & Scruggs

End of year – daylight dwindles, leaves spiral down, creatures big & small prepare for Winter.

Time to hit the PAUSE button and reflect.

What were our goals this year? What was our plan?

What worked? What did not work & why?

What have we learned? How do we apply what we’ve learned?

Difficult questions, all.

Reflection is hard, certainly for me. It’s much easier to pretend, deny, deflect.

It’s much easier to jump to conclusions, and false ‘countermeasures’.

The smarter a management team, the more prone it is to such behavior.

Our attitude seems to be, "I'm so smart & successful, the basics no longer apply..."

The great country music duo, Flatt & Scruggs, put it well:

"Everybody wants the answer, but nobody wants to ask why.

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die"

Why are we like this? Hard-wiring, in my view.

What to do?

1) Recognize & accept it, as a color-blind person accepts she can't see certain colors, and adjusts accordingly.

Let’s admit, "You know, I'm not very good at reflection, or at looking at things objectively. I see what I want to see. I jump to conclusions & half-baked countermeasures."

Such humility usually blunts the worst of our excesses.

2) Build reflection into your routines.

After every major project, launch, strategy, cycle -- hit the PAUSE button.

Our old TMMC plant was especially good at this, and over time it became muscle memory.

So here’s a challenge to all of us. Pull in your team and reflect on the questions above. Answer them honestly and share what you’ve learned. Then apply them.

Here's to a safe & prosperous 2025.

Best,

Pascal




In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

What is a Good Life?
All Systems Must Support Humanity – Including Lean
To Learn Corporate Strategy, Study the Military Masters
Reflections on Deploying Improvement Strategies

What is a Good Life?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Plato, Socrates and Aristotle asked this question 2,500 years ago. Both eastern and western philosophy is largely the search for an answer.

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, Harvard professor, and classic hyper-achiever is raising the same question.

(Quite a conversion, no? Master of the universe to philosopher. Good on you, Clayton.)

In a recent interview, Dr. Christensen remarks that he is struck by how badly the lives of his fellow hyper-achievers have turned out.

Messy divorces, estranged kids, and even, in some cases, fraud and imprisonment.

Can Lean principles help to answer this most important question? I believe it can.

Lean thinking is anchored in standards -- images of how things should be.

Values are standards. Integrity entails adherence to one's personal standards.

Those of you kind enough to read my books may have noted an emphasis on the Cardinal Virtues.

Prudence, Temperance, Courage and Justice, are, of course, standards of behavior.

Low-down, miserable, tricky, treacherous beings such as us have a hard time living up to them.

But we have to try, and in doing so we partially succeed -- and that makes all difference.

So what is a good life? I'd say a good life entails having good values, and trying to live up to them.

Thanks Dr C. for raising the question.

Best regards,

Pascal




In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

All Systems Must Support Humanity – Including Lean
To Learn Corporate Strategy, Study the Military Masters
Reflections on Deploying Improvement Strategies
Hubris and Ethics

All Systems Must Support Humanity – Including Lean

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

The Toyota Production System (TPA, aka ‘Lean’) is perhaps the world’s most powerful management system.

Many people (including the Lean Pathways team & I) have dedicated themselves to learning & practicing its methods & mindsets, and to unlocking its mysteries.

Practiced diligently TPS provides a bountiful harvest. Like all great systems, TPS can be all-encompassing. It can absorb practitioners to such an extent that we can lose sight of the most important things.

Such as why are we practising TPS/Lean? What’s our Purpose?

Strong companies & people define Purpose clearly & simply. They understand that Purpose (often called True North) must be simple, visual and compelling. Something for the head & something for the heart.

And therein lies the challenge. It’s easy to forget about the heart. The Lean system, the methodologies & their interplay, is so engrossing that it absorb all our attention.

All systems, including Lean, must support our humanity – not vice versa!

Sadly, we all know organizations that lose sight of this fundamental idea. There’s a hollowness to them, an emptiness that ultimately limits their achievement.

The history of the 20th century teaches us that supposedly “idealistic” systems can even turn monstrous when disconnected from humanity.

So what’s this mean for the practicing manager and leader? Practice what I call the “Warm Heart Principle”: Easy on the people, hard on the process.

It’s not all about efficiency. It’s about effectiveness, achieving both our head & heart goals.

Don’t want to be misunderstood. I am not saying it’s okay to relax standards. Leaders have to be crispy at times, and being so is not necessarily inhumane. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)

I am saying, keep your heart goal close. Let it inform the management system you are building.

All systems must support humanity.

Best regards,

Pascal




In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

To Learn Corporate Strategy, Study the Military Masters
Reflections on Deploying Improvement Strategies
Hubris and Ethics
TPS and Agile