Ford’s Mulally: It's OK not to be OK

By Al Norval,

I saw this article in USA Today and thought it was such a great example of Leadership exhibiting the Mental Models, that I wanted to share it with you. Allan Mulally, Ford CEO, was talking about his experience at one of his first management meetings with the Executive Leadership team at Ford after he joined the company. Allan had enjoyed a successful career at Boeing and had recently joined Ford as CEO.

Quoting Allan from the USA Today article,

“In one of the Thursday management meetings, where managers are supposed to show color-coded charts, red for serious problems, yellow for lesser issues, green for all OK, "all the charts were green and I know — we're going to lose $17 billion. I stopped the meeting and I said, 'Is there anything that isn't going well? We're losing $17 billion.'”

Imagine that, Ford was losing $17 Billion and not one Executive raised a problem – everything was OK in my area – it must be the other guys.

The culture at Ford at the time was one where you didn’t surface problems. The underlying Mental Model was problems are to be hidden in closets or swept up under the carpet. Don’t admit you had problems. Mulally realized that it was perfectly natural for organizations to have problems and that the only way to get better was to surface the problems and engage people to work on resolving them.

He went on to say "The next week here comes Mark (Fields, now president of Ford's North and South America operations) and his charts are all red. Everybody else's were green. I started to clap, and I said 'That's great.'

As a Leader, Mulally was exhibiting the Mental Model of “Problems are Gold”. It’s OK to surface problems – everyone has them. He understood the way to improvement was to surface problems and get to root cause. Only then could countermeasures be put in place which strengthened their systems so the problems didn’t surface again and again.

Problems are Gold is a Lean Mental Model which is the opposite of the Traditional Mental Model of hiding problems so they can’t be seen.

Leadership is about changing Mental Models which enable our behaviors to change. As senior leaders change their behavior the rest of the organization watches and begins to change their behavior as well. The changes rapidly spread throughout the organization.

It’s OK not to be OK.

See the attached link for the complete article.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2011-07-26-mulally-bad-news_n.htm

 

For more on Mental Models, please see our Lean Brain Booster pocket cards.

Cheers

Lean Laughs



Root Cause of Health Care Crisis?

By Pascal Dennis,

Health Care is a disaster North & South of the border.

Neither Americans, nor Canadians can look on their situation with any satisfaction.

Costs are exploding -- and crowding out other critical expenditures like education, R & D and infrastructure.

Health care outcomes are disappointing. Miracles occur within the silos, catastrophe across them.

What's the root cause of this sorry state of affairs?

Why can't smart, skilled and caring medical professionals do what they're trying to do?

Deming taught us that the problem is in the system -- and he's right again.

Mis-medication, wrong site surgery, infection and other nosocomial calamities occur despite the heroics of nurses, doctors, pharmacists and the many other specialists who keep hospitals going. Indeed, things would likely be much worse but for their heroics.

So what's the root cause of our health care crisis?

Tom Papas, the protagonist of the business novel, The Remedy, tries to answer this question in chapter 13.

He is in rough shape -- he might be losing his father to a mis-medication.

Tom's conclusion: the customer is not the customer.

Only patients, he concludes, can arbitrate the millions of daily decisions that comprise the provision of medical care.

Yet the patient is not the customer in these transactions.

As evidence he reflects on how difficult it has been for his family to get Safety, Quality or Cost information from hospitals.

"And why should they give me info?" he laments. "I'm not the customer."

I've gotten a lot of mail about this chapter!

So what do ya'll think? Is Tom right, or is he not thinking clearly because of his desperate situation?

Are there other root causes that are more important? Any other thoughts or insights?

I'd be pleased to hear from you.

Best regards,
Pascal

Why Brain Booster Pocket Cards?

By Pascal Dennis,

Over the past few years we've spend a great deal of energy on Brain Booster Pocket Cards.

What are we trying to do?

In the spirit of visual management we're trying to crystallize the fundamentals of the Lean Business System.

Less is more -- the cardinal proverb.

We want our three suites -- Lean Thinking, Lean Tools & Lean Leadership -- to complement classic Lean text books.

The Toyota Way, Lean Production Simplified, Managing to Learn, Andy & Me... these are all fine resources -- by they're largely words.

We want to express their essence in pictures.

My personal mission is to translate the profound system of knowledge I was lucky enough to learn at Toyota.

I want to make it available to people all over the world.

So our images will be available in a variety of media: pocket cards, posters, iPhone apps etc.

Next -- how do you use them?

Watch our blog for updates...

Visual Management in New Product Development

By Pascal Dennis,

Lean thinking is moving out of the factory -- downstream into sales, logistics and order fulfillment, and upstream into finance, marketing and New Product Development (NPD).

We're often asked, how do you apply the fundamentals in these areas?

For example, how might you apply visual management in NPD?

A good first step is to decide, What do we need to know to run our business?

Here are typical answers:

a) What's the project loading at each point (P0, P1, P2) in our development pipeline?

b) What are min/max levels and our status at each point?

c) What are the biggest obstacles in each project?

d) Do we have countermeasure plans? What's their status?

e) What are broader system issues? Do we have countermeasure plans? Status?

Now we're ready to engage our teams in developing visual tools that will make the invisible, visible.

In our consulting work we've used funnels, race tracks, football fields, as well as, team boards and the like.

Visual management is also invaluable in NPD physical plants (e.g. Test Labs), and is similar to what you might find in a factory.

For example:

a) What's this week's work?

b) Are we ahead or behind?

c) What are our biggest obstacles? Countermeasure plans & status?

d) How versatile are our people?

e) What's the loading on our machines? Constraints?

The key, again, is to make the invisible, visible.

For more on Lean thinking outside the factory, please check out The Remedy.

Cheers,

Pascal

Why Lean Outside the Factory?

By Pascal Dennis,


I wrote a book about it --The Remedy.

Why did I bother?

Because Lean is about reducing waste & variation -- and most of it is outside the factory.

Factories, and Operations in general, have continued to improve the past few decades.

Though there is still much opportunity, in many industries they are no longer the bottleneck.

When you buy a new car, for example, most of the lead time is outside the factory.

(Autos usually spend a couple of days in the factory, whereas total lead times are typically several months.)

Sales, Marketing, Design, Engineering and so on are the "undiscovered country".

How do we support the good people in these areas?

Here are a few questions to get us started.

For each zone, ask:

1) What is waste?

2) What is value?

3) What are some core mental models?

If we can build on these to define our Purpose clearly, we'll can start to pull in powerful Lean tools to help us achieve that Purpose.

(For more on how to do this, interested readers are referred to the book Getting the Right Things Done)

Best regards,

Pascal

BE CAREFUL WHEN GOING TO GEMBA

I read a recent blog by Mark Graban in his Lean Blog http://www.leanblog.org/ that I found intriguing and wanted to pass it on to you.

The basic theme is – there is more to “Go to Gemba” than just showing up. We hear a lot about the need to “Go To Gemba” but if we just go and hang around then we go back to management by walking around and that’s not what we want. Rather we want to “Go to Gemba” with a purpose. We need to have a clear understanding of what we are trying to do. If not, we face the problems Mark Graban describes in a recent blog:

Lean Thinkers might wonder “what is bad about going to the Gemba?” Well, going to the Gemba could be a bad idea and could make things worse if leaders exhibit the wrong kind of behaviours. This old urban legend helps articulate that in a cheeky way:

Thanks to the site Snopes.com, a site that debunks (or verifies) urban legends and myths, here is one version of a classic factory story:
[Braude, 1965]

The proprietor of a shop was once passing during the packing room and noticed a boy lounging towards a field and whistling cheerfully. Thinking of all his cash being wasted on this sort of exertions, the corporation requested gruffly, “How much do you get a week?” “Ten dollars,” the boy spoke back. “Here’s your pay for the week,” stated the person. “Now get out!” On his as far back as the administrative center, the shop proprietor bumped into the foreman and requested him, “When did we hire that boy, and who is responsible for hiring him?”  “We never hired him,” the foreman stated. “He was just delivering a package from another firm.”

The story is a silly one, but it illustrates one possible failure mode involved with going to the Gemba – jumping to conclusions and making on-the-spot top-down decisions out of anger. The words of Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho, “Go see, ask why, show respect” are now famous as basic lean principles.

Thanks to Mark for this story which is a great example of “Go to Gemba” with no clear purpose where we only do the first of the three parts of “Go to Gemba” which is “Go See”.  What we should be doing is all three parts so that we “Go See” but more importantly “Ask Why” based on what we have observed so that we fully understand what is actually happening and finally do so with the intent of building the capability of our teams  and in doing so “Show Respect” for them. Asking questions is a Socratic way of building Team Member capability by getting them to think deeply about the situation and allows Leadership to introduce and reinforce problem solving based on their observations.

So the purpose of “Go to Gemba” is to develop a deep understanding of what is happening and to use that understanding to deepen Team Members understanding and so the Team Members ability to use that understanding to solve problems. Ultimately, we develop many problem solvers in the organization. Without this clear purpose, Leadership can turn “Go to Gemba” into a very different experience from its initial intent.

Cheers,
Al Norval

THE POWER OF IMAGES

By Al Norval,

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s remarkable how true this is. Pictures and images have the power to convey more than the words they represent. They have the power to move us and invoke a connection to our deeper emotions – humour, laughter, sadness even rage and fear. They are able to connect to our emotional core.



Certain images become locked in over time – they become endless. How many of you can recall The Mona Lisa’s smile, Neil Armstrong standing on the moon, Winston Churchill’s portrait and the horrible image of the burning of the World Trade Center. All represent more than a picture or a painting.

Images are more than just photographs. Corporate branding for example, where the iconic images of great brands such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, MacDonald’s and Mercedes all have the power to invoke memories, feelings and thoughts about the products. I’m sure each of you had the brand image dash quickly through your mind’s eye at the mention of these brands.

But what has this got to do with Lean?

Let’s go back to basics. Lean is about engaging our Team Members to solve problems and remove waste every day to create more value for our Customers. To do that we need to not only solve problems but to share the learning rapidly across the organization. By doing this we become a learning organization with the capability of our Team Members getting higher and higher over time. The higher capability people have, the more problems they can solve and so enter a benevolent cycle of learning and problem solving.

The key to sustaining this is the ability of both the organization and individual Team Members to remember what they learned and what was shared in problem solving. Memory is the ability to store, retain, and recall information. But in today’s world of information overload, how do we improve the ability of our Team Members to store, retain and recall information?

Simple answer – we use images.

Images are stored in our brains as Visual Memory. That’s the part of our memory that preserves some of the characteristics of our senses pertaining to the visual experience. We are able to place into memory, visual information which represents thoughts and ideas. The neural connections are stronger if we have an emotional sense tied to the image. That emotional connection is why we can remember images to a far greater degree than we can remember mere facts or words and sentences. As we tie these images into a learning experience that is cheerful, light and engaging, the thoughts and ideas get quickly locked into memory resulting in a higher capability of our Team Members to solve problems.

In summary, we can achieve better recall of key learning points and problem solving if we use simple, elegant images with a touch of humour that ties the message to our soul.

For more on Images and Lean, please see Lean Brain Boosters at http://www.leansystems.org/