If It’s Not Simple, It's…

Pascal Dennis, author of Getting the Right Things Done

To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, "any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he's doing is a charlatan." This principle is especially true in Strategy execution, where human leadership & charisma cannot be replaced. In fact, it is my strong belief that in the age of AI, these will comprise the essential, irreplaceable app.

AI agents will eventually be able to handle many jobs, but can they define, deploy & execute Strategy? Can AI agents define Purpose in a transcendent way, such that gifted team members embrace it, and put their differences aside for a great goal? Can AI agents motivate a team to sustain its heart & fighting spirit in the face of inevitable setbacks, to keep going in spite of everything? (To be sure, the teams of the future will comprise both human and AI agents.)

"What are we trying to achieve? “How will we win - what is the logic?" In Strategy sessions, I`m a proverbial broken record. We've been taught that complexity is profound. In fact, complexity is a crude state. Simplicity marks the end of a process of refining.

The late great physicist, Richard Feynman, looked and talked like a New York City cabbie. His Caltech freshmen lectures in Physics, and all his books are classics for their simplicity & humor. How did Feynman achieve that level of clarity? Through slow, patient reflection, by turning a problem over and over in his mind until a 'simple' explanation suggested itself. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and is a process of refinement.

© 2025 Lean Pathways Inc.

In our frantic, time-starved age, that's where the shoe pinches, no? These days, who has time to turn a problem over and over in their mind? Who has the time, as Einstein did, to imagine himself riding a light beam - so as to makes sense of time and gravity and light?

Which invokes the second great law of strategy: Less is more. Knowing we'll be time-starved, please let's not over-fill our strategy plates, like teenagers at a buffet. "First we'll do this, then this and this and that over there. Oh, and then we'll..."

Design Thinking & Lean Experimentation, core Innovation methodologies, force you to simplify and clarify your offering. Once we’ve answered a series of core questions around the customer, we work our way up the ‘hockey stick’ by defining & validating a series of ‘minimal’ offerings.

Similarly, in strategy, we want to define, deploy & validate our 'minimum viable plan', monitoring what happens, and adjusting as the inevitable 'known, and unknown, unknowns' arise.

Breakthrough entails walking up the stairs in the fog, continually making & easy quick experiments, most of them yielding a negative result. If it’s not simple, it’s BS.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis

E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

PS To learn more about my Strategy Execution program, Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World, feel free to drop me a line.




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

Igniting New Growth – Aristotle’s Two Worlds, Part 2
Igniting New Growth – Aristotle’s Two Worlds
Innovation Does Not Begin with Technology
Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World

Content Follows Form or Acting Your Way to New Thinking

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

By walking, I found out where I was going
Irving Layton

Acting your way to new thinking is easier than the other way round. (Tip of the hat to my colleague Mike Rother.)

That’s why Politeness is called the door to the Great Virtues – (another tip of the hat, this time to Andre Comte-Sponville.)

Politeness is pure form. Our children don’t understand why they have to behave in a certain way. But the more they do it, the more they come to understand Gentleness, Humility, Compassion and other great virtues.

Content follows form. May I suggest that form helps to create content? The imitation of virtue over time becomes the real thing.

What’s this got to do with Lean management? Quite a bit.

Lean excellence rests on a set of mental models or mindsets, which I’ve described in some detail (Getting the Right Things Done). These include:

• Leaders are teachers


• Go see for yourself


• Make problems visible


• Engage everybody in improvement work…

What’s the best way to change one’s behavior? Why, through a set of routines – even if you don’t fully understand why you’re doing them.

Understanding will come: “Holy cow, I had no idea what was actually happening. If I hadn’t gone to see for myself, I’d have made a disastrous mistake!”

Or, “Good thing we committed to involving the front line in planning our launch, and giving them the authority to stop and fix problems. It’s our best launch ever!”

Or, “I thought standardized work would hinder my creativity. But it’s freeing me up. I now have time to reflect, coach and make strategy!”

In our old Toyota plant, I often didn’t understand why we did certain things – daily stand-up meetings, scheduled & purposeful gemba walks, PDCA cycles around all significant activities and the like.

But I did all these things because that’s what you did in a Toyota factory, and because I intuited a deeper, richer pattern, a chessboard grander than any I’d imagine before.

By walking I found out where I was going.

Best regards,

Pascal



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

Value & Waste at the Imperial Grill
Value in an Age of Endless Innovation
The Power of One Page
Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change

Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

I wrote a book called Getting the Right Things Done about protecting your core business. GRTD found an audience and my team & I have helped a lot of companies implement the methods I described. They’re a practical, and proven way to bullet-proof your company.

But that’s no longer enough. Today, we must also Ignite new Growth using methods pioneered in the world’s innovation hot spots. And that’s been my focus the past several years. How to create an ambidextrous organization? One that is bullet-proof in its core business, and yet able to intuit unmet customer needs, and rapidly build, measure, and learn its way up the innovation ladder. One that can not just improve existing customer journeys, but create new journeys, offerings, and even new businesses. I wrote a book about it called Harnessing Digital Disruption which describes my adventures in Singapore’s lively innovation ecosystem.

In fact, I’ve spent the past five years in the world’s innovation hot spots learning how to ignite new growth using Digital methods. My team & I have built and validated a powerful body of knowledge which we believe can transform your organization. And now I’d like to share what we’ve learned in a series of new workshops. The first is called Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World. Our target audience is the organization that is serious about Innovation, that wants to become truly ambidextrous. Our workshops will available both on-site and remotely. They will not be available publicly because we want to focus on your business – your aspiration, winning logic, and challenges.

Protecting the Core business is no longer enough. We must also Ignite New Growth. GRTD in a Digital World and the workshops that follow will get you started in this essential journey. If all this sounds intriguing, please click on the link below.



Regards,

Pascal



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

On Big Data
Why Lean Outside the Factory?
Too Often, Power Means the Power to Do Stupid Things
When You’re Convinced You’re Right, You’ve Lost Your Ability to Learn

Why Lean Outside the Factory?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

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 of the factory.

The past few decades, factories, and Operations in general, have gotten better and better.

There’s still much opportunity, but in many industries they are no longer the bottleneck.

Suppose you order a new Toyota Avalon, Total lead time (i.e. time between your order and delivery) will be something like 30 days.

How much of that time does the vehicle spend at the Toyota Kentucky factory?

A day or so. Most of the lead time is outside the factory and comprises administration, transportation, and plenty of waiting. So where is the opportunity?

Sales, Marketing, Design, Engineering, Finance 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 (Getting the Right Things Done)

Best regards,

Pascal



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

Too Often, Power Means the Power to Do Stupid Things
When You’re Convinced You’re Right, You’ve Lost Your Ability to Learn
On Labels – ‘Expert, Master, Sensei’ and the like
Fred Taylor & the Illusion of Top-Down Control - Part 2

Why Do ‘Smart’ People Struggle with Strategy?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

I’ve been coaching senior executives for more than a decade now.

Good, fun work with smart, fundamentally decent people. (If they’re not, I skedaddle.)

But you know what? The smarter they are, the more they struggle with strategy! Strange, no? Here’s a critical leadership skill for which excessive smartness can be a liability!

What’s going on? Well, most of these folks have gotten to where they are by having the right answer, and by proving thereby, that they’re the proverbial ‘smartest people in the room’.

But in strategy, there is no right answer. In any complex industry or field of endeavour, there are too many variables, too many unknowns.

In chess, arguably our greatest strategy game, the number of potential positions exceeds the number atoms in the universe.

Given such complexity, Is there a right answer? Of course not – there is only a right process. And this process, which I’ve tried to describe in my books [Andy & Me and the Hospital, and Getting the Right Things Done] includes the following steps:

1. Define purpose clearly
2. Identify the major obstacles & needed capabilities
3. Articulate a hypothesis
4. Run the hypothesis and quickly adjust based on what happens
5. Keep going till you reach your objective

By contrast, if senior leader is fixated on finding out the ‘right answer’, (and telling people how to effect it), bad things can happen:

• The activities that make up the false plan are, at the very least, a waste of time and energy
• The management team can stop caring
• Front line team members, who often have a better understanding of the problem, can become cynical
• “Here comes another brilliant top-down initiative”
• “Our leaders are bozos – we’re doomed”

In summary, in strategy there is no right answer. There is only a right process.

Here are some corollaries:

• Diversity in a management team is a good thing. More viewpoints bring a deeper understanding
• There’s no need to seek perfection in strategy – it doesn’t exist
• Seek to develop a shared understanding of the problem, and of our overall approach to solving it
• Admit you don’t know, and go see for yourself to better understand your purpose, obstacles and needed capabilities
• Be humble, for heaven’s sake

More to come.

Best wishes,

Pascal




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

Social Media & the Lean Business System -- Risks & Opportunities
Images and A3 Thinking
Why Lean in Sales?
Back to Basics - What is Value?

Images and A3 Thinking

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Seems Getting the Right Things Done has been helpful in teaching A3 Thinking, the "story-telling" approach to strategy.

I'm gratified by all the good people who've told me, "That book really helped us – thanks!"

We're hard-wired to tell stories -- that's what our ancestors on the African savannah did at day's end around the fire.

(They didn't show PowerPoint...)

Like any good story, a good A3 pulls you in...

"And what happens next?" you wonder.

Where do images fit in?

Assignment

Here's an assignment for folks that have gained proficiency developing A3s.

Turn your A3 over – now draw a picture that tells the story.

Don't worry if you "can't draw" – stick figures, circles and arrows are all you need.

Now tell the story to your team through the image.

The better your understanding of the problem, the easier this'll be – and the clearer your image.

Hope they're helpful.

Cheers,

Pascal




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

Why Lean in Sales?
Back to Basics - What is Value?
You Want to Get More Done? Do Less…
Strategy Deployment & Language

Where Lean Has Gone Wrong & What to Do About It, Part 1

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Jim Womack had once written an insightful & heartfelt piece about where lean had failed. (Jim is a friend, supporter and visionary, not to mention a person of decency & kindness. It’s fair to say that Jim & Dan Jones kicked off the Lean movement twenty years ago. Their insights have penetrating ever since.)

Here are a few thoughts, building on Jim’s points.

Lean is hard and only fully succeeds when there is aligned motivation on many levels. While it’s true that few transformations succeed without the senior leader’s full-hearted participation, that’s not enough.

We need a single-minded strength of purpose throughout the organization. We need front line team leaders and middle managers teaching & doing the right thing – even when nobody is watching. And that, of course, means a management system, (a concept I’ve tried to illuminate, especially in all my most recent stuff - Andy & Me and the Hospital.)

Single-minded strength of purpose also requires full alignment between the organization’s Purpose, and each member’s Purpose. Toyota’s corresponding alignment is more or less: “You do the work that needs doing and help us to improve, and you’ll have an engaging & well-paying job here for as long as you want it.”

I believe each organization needs to develop something similar, in accord with its culture. Do not copy Toyota or any other strong Lean company. This alignment must resonate with your team members, culture and industry. In a number of our partner firms, the deal is subtly different: “You do the work that needs doing and help us to improve, and you’ll learn & grow more than you ever thought possible, and will do cool things for as long as you want to.”

People systems including Recruitment, Succession Planning and Compensation are central of course, and a very common impediment. We have to start with Strategy Deployment, the senior leader’s core methodology.

Negative motivators can be helpful too. A number of Lean Pathways team members are Toyota alumni and remember the acronym CLM – Career Limiting Move! Any selfish, destructive, random, political disrespectful to a team member, the customer or the community would quality as a CLM. Any action that compromised Safety or Quality was a CLM. A few CLMs and your future at Toyota was in doubt. These are, in effect, a healthy version of the corporate antibodies.

One more thing. After a decade & a half of practice, our Lean Pathways team has lived through many transformations. In every blow your socks off, get out of town, let’s do the Moon Walk in slow motion transformation, (pardon the body English), the CEO, COO and their teams have a) made significant time for Executive Coaching, and b) been wide open to making corresponding changes in their day to day work.

More to come.

Best regards,

Pascal




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

What is Courage & What’s It Mean for Strategy?
"How Will You Motivate Your Team, Pascal-san?"
What is a Good Life?
To Learn Corporate Strategy, Study the Military Masters

"Too Much School Destroys the Mind..."

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Like many of my colleagues I went to a professional school (Engineering), then a business school.

I dutifully did all my assignments, got good marks and climbed up the ladder.

Nobody told me about the glasses I'd been given. Nobody told me that they would distort my image of the world.

Nobody told me it would take a decade or more to learn to see clearly again. And I was lucky...

People got to professional schools and business schools with the best of intentions.

They want a better job, more responsibility and higher pay -- all worthy & admirable goals.

But my professors never told me they were teaching dysfunctional mindsets.

(Getting the Right Things Done and The Remedy express my thoughts on mental models.)

Probably, they didn't even realize it themselves.

They too, were just trying to make their way in their careers, seeking the path of least resistance.

Perhaps the most dysfunctional was the idea that improvement depended on ‘smart’ people like me devising cunning plans – and everybody else doing as they were told.

(I’m reminded of a line from the old Blackadder series: "I’m going to devise a plan so cunning, you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel!”)

In any event, ideas have legs. Dysfunctional mental models mutate, and debilitate their host.

The result?

Smart, well-educate, capable people who have forgotten the fundamentals.

As my dad used to say (about me), "Too much school destroys the mind..."

Regards,

Pascal

Where Lean Has Gone Wrong & What to Do About It, Part 1

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Thanks to Jim Womack for his insightful & heartfelt piece about this last month. (Jim is a friend, supporter and visionary, not to mention a person of decency & kindness. It’s fair to say that Jim & Dan Jones kicked off the Lean movement twenty years ago. Their insights have penetrating ever since.)

Here are a few thoughts, building on Jim’s points.

Lean is hard and only fully succeeds when there is aligned motivation on many levels. While it’s true that few transformations succeed without the senior leader’s full-hearted participation, that’s not enough.

We need a single-minded strength of purpose throughout the organization. We need front line team leaders and middle managers teaching & doing the right thing – even when nobody is watching. And that, of course, means a management system, (a concept I’ve tried to illuminate, especially in all my most recent stuff - Andy & Me and the Hospital.)

Single-minded strength of purpose also requires full alignment between the organization’s Purpose, and each member’s Purpose. Toyota’s corresponding alignment is more or less: “You do the work that needs doing and help us to improve, and you’ll have an engaging & well-paying job here for as long as you want it.”

I believe each organization needs to develop something similar, in accord with its culture. Do not copy Toyota or any other strong Lean company. This alignment must resonate with your team members, culture and industry. In a number of our partner firms, the deal is subtly different: “You do the work that needs doing and help us to improve, and you’ll learn & grow more than you ever thought possible, and will do cool things for as long as you want to.”

People systems including Recruitment, Succession Planning and Compensation are central of course, and a very common impediment. We have to start with Strategy Deployment, the senior leader’s core methodology.

Negative motivators can be helpful too. A number of Lean Pathways team members are Toyota alumni and remember the acronym CLM – Career Limiting Move! Any selfish, destructive, random, political disrespectful to a team member, the customer or the community would quality as a CLM. Any action that compromised Safety or Quality was a CLM. A few CLMs and your future at Toyota was in doubt. These are, in effect, a healthy version of the corporate antibodies.

One more thing. After a decade & a half of practice, our Lean Pathways team has lived through many transformations. In every blow your socks off, get out of town, let’s do the Moon Walk in slow motion transformation, (pardon the body English), the CEO, COO and their teams have a) made significant time for Executive Coaching, and b) been wide open to making corresponding changes in their day to day work.

More to come.

Best regards,

Pascal

Why Do ‘Smart’ People Struggle with Strategy?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

I’ve been coaching senior executives for more than a decade now.

Good, fun work with smart, fundamentally decent people. (If they’re not, I skedaddle.)

But you know what? The smarter they are, the more they struggle with strategy! Strange, no? Here’s a critical leadership skill for which excessive smartness can be a liability!

What’s going on? Well, most of these folks have gotten to where they are by having the right answer, and by proving thereby, that they’re the proverbial ‘smartest people in the room’.

But in strategy, there is no right answer. In any complex industry or field of endeavour, there are too many variables, too many unknowns.

In chess, arguably our greatest strategy game, the number of potential positions exceeds the number atoms in the universe.

Given such complexity, Is there a right answer? Of course not – there is only a right process. And this process, which I’ve tried to describe in my books [Andy & Me and the Hospital, and Getting the Right Things Done] includes the following steps:

1. Define purpose clearly
2. Identify the major obstacles & needed capabilities
3. Articulate a hypothesis
4. Run the hypothesis and quickly adjust based on what happens
5. Keep going till you reach your objective

By contrast, if senior leader is fixated on finding out the ‘right answer’, (and telling people how to effect it), bad things can happen:

• The activities that make up the false plan are, at the very least, a waste of time and energy
• The management team can stop caring
• Front line team members, who often have a better understanding of the problem, can become cynical
• “Here comes another brilliant top-down initiative”
• “Our leaders are bozos – we’re doomed”

In summary, in strategy there is no right answer. There is only a right process.

Here are some corollaries:

• Diversity in a management team is a good thing. More viewpoints bring a deeper understanding
• There’s no need to seek perfection in strategy – it doesn’t exist
• Seek to develop a shared understanding of the problem, and of our overall approach to solving it
• Admit you don’t know, and go see for yourself to better understand your purpose, obstacles and needed capabilities
• Be humble, for heaven’s sake

More in the blogs to come.

Best wishes,

Pascal

Content Follows Form or Acting Your Way to New Thinking

By Pascal Dennis

By walking, I found out where I was going
Irving Layton

Acting your way to new thinking is easier than the other way round. (Tip of the hat to my colleague Mike Rother.)

That’s why Politeness is called the door to the Great Virtues – (another tip of the hat, this time to Andre Comte-Sponville.)

Politeness is pure form. Our children don’t understand why they have to behave in a certain way. But the more they do it, the more they come to understand Gentleness, Humility, Compassion and other great virtues.

Content follows form. May I suggest that form helps to create content? The imitation of virtue over time becomes the real thing.

What’s this got to do with Lean management? Quite a bit.

Lean excellence rests on a set of mental models or mindsets, which I’ve described in some detail (Getting the Right Things Done). These include:

• Leaders are teachers


• Go see for yourself


• Make problems visible


• Engage everybody in improvement work…

What’s the best way to change one’s behavior? Why, through a set of routines – even if you don’t fully understand why you’re doing them.

Understanding will come: “Holy cow, I had no idea what was actually happening. If I hadn’t gone to see for myself, I’d have made a disastrous mistake!”

Or, “Good thing we committed to involving the front line in planning our launch, and giving them the authority to stop and fix problems. It’s our best launch ever!”

Or, “I thought standardized work would hinder my creativity. But it’s freeing me up. I now have time to reflect, coach and make strategy!”

In our old Toyota plant, I often didn’t understand why we did certain things – daily stand-up meetings, scheduled & purposeful gemba walks, PDCA cycles around all significant activities and the like.

But I did all these things because that’s what you did in a Toyota factory, and because I intuited a deeper, richer pattern, a chessboard grander than any I’d imagine before.

By walking I found out where I was going.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Getting the Right Things Done – and Making it Stick

By Pascal Dennis

Join Pascal et al for Game-Changing Lean Workshops in San Diego – February 1 & 2, 2016

More and more of my coaching work is around sustaining the gains.

How do you get the right things done – and make it stick? It’s one thing to get strong – and quite another to stay strong.

To that end, I’m pleased to offer a new Strategy Deployment workshop with our colleagues at San Diego State University.

Sammy Obara, Darril Wilburn of Honsha, seasoned Toyota senseis, and our market partners for more than a decade, will be joining me.

We’re very much hoping to offer game-changing knowledge and experience, and a more than a few laughs – in a beautiful town.

Hope to see you all there.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Getting the Right Things Done – and Making it Stick

By Pascal Dennis

Join Pascal et al for Game-Changing Lean Workshops in San Diego – February 1 & 2, 2016

More and more of my coaching work is around sustaining the gains.

How do you get the right things done – and make it stick? It’s one thing to get strong – and quite another to stay strong.

To that end, I’m pleased to offer a new Strategy Deployment workshop with our colleagues at San Diego State University.

Sammy Obara, Darril Wilburn of Honsha, seasoned Toyota senseis, and our market partners for more than a decade, will be joining me.

We’re very much hoping to offer game-changing knowledge and experience, and a more than a few laughs – in a beautiful town.

Hope to see you all there.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Getting the Right Things Done - Workshop

By Pascal Dennis

Getting the Right Things Done – and Making it Stick

Game-Changing Lean Workshops in San Diego – February 1 & 2, 2016

The past few years more and more of my coaching work is around sustaining the gains.

How do you get the right things done – and make it stick?

It’s one thing to get strong – and quite another to stay strong.

To that end, I’m pleased to offer a new Strategy Deployment Workshop with our colleagues at San Diego State University.

Sammy Obara, Darril Wilburn of Honsha, our market partners for more than a decade, will be joining me.

Sammy and Darril are seasoned Toyota senseis with decades of experience.

They’re also great fellows and dear friends. (Never a harsh word or hassle in all our time working together.)

We’re very much hoping to offer game-changing knowledge and experience, and a more than a few laughs – in a beautiful town.

Hope to see you all there.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Lean & Wakefulness - Reprise

By Pascal Dennis

The Lean Business System, at heart, is about wakefulness.

Philosophers throughout the ages have argued that we are sleepers in a dream, that our grasp of what's actually happening is, at best, tenuous.

Many schools of philosophy and religion include exercises, prayer or meditation designed to "wake" the sleeper.

Lean tools like visual management, 5 S, standardized work, and pokayoke, are meant to jolt us out of our slumber.

"Hey, buddy wake up! There's a problem over here!"

Strategy Deployment, the application of the scientific method to our enterprise, is also about wakefulness.

Our Level 1, 2 and 3 check processes, for example, should be stand-up meetings in front of a board or wall that makes "hot spots" painfully clear.

"Holy cow, look at that! We should do something..."

My books Getting the Right Things Done, Andy & Me and its sequel, The Remedy, all entail the protagonists' gradual awakening.

Let me conclude with a mixed metaphor: In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed woman is queen.

Cheers,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise: Lean & Wakefulness

By Pascal Dennis

The Lean Business System, at heart, is about wakefulness.

Philosophers throughout the ages have argued that we are sleepers in a dream, that our grasp of what's actually happening is, at best, tenuous.

Many schools of philosophy and religion include exercises, prayer or meditation designed to "wake" the sleeper.

Lean tools like visual management, 5 S, standardized work, and pokayoke, are meant to jolt us out of our slumber.

"Hey, buddy wake up! There's a problem over here!"

Strategy Deployment, the application of the scientific method to our enterprise, is also about wakefulness.

Our Level 1, 2 and 3 check processes, for example, should be stand-up meetings in front of a board or wall that makes "hot spots" painfully clear.

"Holy cow, look at that! We should do something..."

My books (Getting the Right Things Done, Andy & Me, The Remedy) all entail the protagonists' gradual awakening.

Let me conclude with a mixed metaphor: In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed woman is queen.

Cheers,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise - 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 of the factory.

The past few decades, factories, and Operations in general, have gotten better and better.

There’s still much opportunity, but in many industries they are no longer the bottleneck.

Suppose you order a new Toyota Avalon, Total lead time (i.e. time between your order and delivery) will be something like 30 days.

How much of that time does the vehicle spend at the Toyota Kentucky factory?

A day or so. Most of the lead time is outside the factory and comprises administration, transportation, and plenty of waiting. So where is the opportunity?

Sales, Marketing, Design, Engineering, Finance 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 (Getting the Right Things Done)

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise - More Reflections on True North

By Pascal Dennis

Is there anything more demoralizing than being cut off from Purpose?

A good way of driving a person mad is forcing them to do purposeless activity over and over.

Strategy Deployment begins with True North, our strategic & philosophical Purpose.

True North comprises:

1. "Hard" goal, usually entailing critical end-of-pipe measures, e.g. Revenue, EBIT, fatalities, and,
2. "Broad-brush" goal, a few words defining our purpose, vision, commitment

We also encourage leadership teams to draw a picture of where they want to be.

Our image will show our hard & broad-brush goals, and how we will go about our business.

But the business chessboard is foggy, multi-dimensional, and unpredictable.

Why bother to define a distant, uncertain future?

Because doing so forces us out of the rut of our current thinking.

We engage dormant neural pathways thereby, and begin to see the "clear blue sky", i.e. what's possible.

Rapid experimentation in accord with the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle dispels the fog.

We get a little better every day.

Strategy Deployment is messy, intuitive, imprecise, a marriage between the Right & Left brain, between intuition & logic, art & science.

I'm reminded of Jack Nicklaus, perhaps the greatest golfer ever, whose swing routine always entailed imagining the perfect shot.

Or of Michelangelo seeing the perfect sculpture in the marble block.

Cheers,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

How Do We Start with Lean?

By Pascal Dennis

I'd suggest you begin by asking the most basic & difficult question:

"What problem are we trying to solve?"

Growth? Profitability? Throughput? Quality? Safety?

What are possible causes?

Malignant market forces? Core technologies at risk of becoming obsolete? Empty new product pipeline?

Decaying factories? Apathetic, stagnant or hostile work force? Dysfunctional mental models?

You can begin your analysis with analytical tools, but please, get out of your office and confirm your analysis by seeing root causes with your own eyes.

Thereby, you'll begin to develop a deeper understanding the chessboard, and of root causes and possible countermeasures.

Lean comprises an interconnected set of methodologies supported by a rich, an often paradoxical, "Thinking Way".

Lean may well be an excellent approach to dealing with your 'mess', but it's not to be entered into lightly.

If the organization isn't serious, it may be better not to embark on the journey.

Ideally, the senior leadership team and Board are fully aligned behind the transformation.

How to achieve such alignment?

Here I defer to our friend and colleague, Art Byrne, and his splendid book, The Lean Turnaround.

What if the ideal level of support is lacking? This is where things get tricky.

There should, in my view, be at least two or three respected senior champions who will support a Lean pilot in a major division.

An experiment, if you will, with the understanding that, if things go well, the organization will broaden & deepen the work.

Senior leaders must also commit to Lean education concurrent with the pilot, so they can get a basic understanding of the thinking and practices informing the pilot zone.

If the organization meets this basic test, you're probably good to go to the question of Strategy Deployment [Getting the Right Things Done]:

How will we deploy Lean in the pilot zone so as to achieve our Purpose?

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Start Lean, Getting the Right Things Done, The Lean Turnaround, Strategy Deployment, How Do We Start with Lean?

Getting the Right Things Done – Atlanta, April 8 – 9

(and a Tip of the Hat to LEI)

By Pascal Dennis

Hi folks,

Our friends & colleagues at Lean Enterprise Institute are offering a nice promotion to our readers.

Folks attending my Getting the Right Things Done presentation in Atlanta April 8 to 9 will receive a 12.5% discount ($ 100 per day).

Not bad! Just input my last name in the discount code box when checking out.

I’ve been an LEI faculty member since 2002. Good folks, good fun, and never a harsh word in all that time.

Please support them, as we at LPI do.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio