One More For Mr. Disney

By Pascal Dennis

Further to my earlier blog posting, here are more musings on Walt Disney & lean principles.

Walt's natural instinct for Strategy Deployment helped him define Disneyland's famous Four Disciplines, which first appeared in 1950's training manuals.

They are (in order of importance):

• Safety
• Courtesy
• Showmanship
• Efficiency

I'm struck by the parallel with Toyota's famous four:

• Safety
• Quality
• Delivery
• Cost

At Toyota manager training these became our mantra. We came to understand that each focus area built on the last.

Safety improvements came first, then quality and delivery. Cost improvement was the last to come, but it stuck when it did, because we'd built a solid foundation for it.

Strange how so many companies focus on Cost alone -- and come to grief thereby.

Walt also understood the importance of touching the head and the heart -- another cornerstone of Strategy Deployment.

"The thing that makes us different is our way of thinking....We seem to know when to 'tap the heart'. Those who hit the intellect only appeal to a very limited group."

Last year I took my family to Disneyworld in Orlando. I casually asked several "cast members" about the Four Disciplines.

Each was able to rhyme them off and explain their significance.

Focus and alignment -- half a century later.

Well done, Mr. Disney.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reflections on True North

By Pascal Dennis

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

True North comprises:

1. a "Hard" goal, usually entailing critical end-of-pipe measures, e.g. Revenue, EBIT, fatalities, and,
   


2. a "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.

Michangelo's unfinished sculpture "Bound Slave"

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

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 and it's 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

Strategy Deployment and Chess

By Pascal Dennis

What's the difference between Strategy Deployment and other planning & execution systems?

I get this question all the time.

SD is akin to playing chess. The left side of your strategy A3 summarizes your grasp of the current "chess position".

"I'm attacking on the King side, my opponent on the Queen side. My pawn structure is weak, but I have dangerous bishops, but his King is well protected. In order to checkmate him, I need to..."

As in chess, sports -- or life, grasping the situation requires both your rational mind & your gut feel.

Chess grandmasters do a lot of analysis -- but they also look at their opponent's face & body language, and take in the atmosphere in the tournament hall...

The right side of your paper summarizes your plan based on that deep intuitive understanding.

"I need to slow down his Queen side attack by....and shore up my weak pawns by doing....Then I can break through on the King side by..."

How do we gain that deep understanding? By going to see, running experiments and reflecting deeply on results, by PDCA in other words.

Otherwise, strategy devolves into "wood-pushing" -- same old dull moves & results.

The challenge and joy of Strategy Deployment is in:

1) Clearing the fog so you can see the chessboard,

2) Keeping it clear (with visual management and other techniques) so that you can assess the effect of your  moves,

3) Maintaining focus despite a strategy's long cycle time (1 year plus),

4) Learning from what happens -- and sharing that learning, and

5) Locking in the process so it becomes "no big deal"

Not easy, but if it were, Strategy Deployment wouldn't be a killer app...

The Work of Leaders

By Pascal Dennis

Had a eureka moment the other day: The leader's job is to ensure that all their people are working on the right things.

Rather bland, but true, no?

Respect for humanity means I won't waste my team's time asking them to do stupid or wasteful things.

Here's an extreme example to illustrate the point:

One of the most vicious punishments meted out in the awful Soviet gulags was this:

Spend all day digging out a large hole. Then spend the next day filling it back in.

Prisoners would go mad with the meaninglessness of it.

But consider how it parallels so much corporate work.

I've seen good, smart people doing much the same work -- at the whim of some executive, or to satisfy some absurd corporate rule.

"Dig out that hole! Now fill it back in!"

After a while people really do get twitchy. To paraphrase Winston Smith at the end of Animal Farm,
"Two plus two really does equal five..."

So those of us that are lucky enough to be leaders have to accept this heavy responsibility.

Use my people's time wisely.

They're not cannon fodder.

P.S. Check out Getting the Right Things Done for help on how to do this!

What is Hubris?

By Pascal Dennis

"The US Department of Transportation has completely cleared Toyota of any safety issues beyond those identified and dealt with before the safety crisis. Yet Toyota has recognized internal difficulties in both growing too fast and not listening to customers enough. What should we learn from the whole episode?"



An iconic company, synonymous with safety and quality, has been brought low by plaintiff lawyers and an opportunistic government.

My sense is Toyota's reputation will recover quicker than expected, whereas the government's has suffered yet another heavy blow. 

Harpers February 2011 issue has an interesting piece entitled "A Super Bowl Spot for Uncle Sam -- Can Madison Avenue Make Us Love Our Government?"   

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/02/0083294.  

Short answer: not if they keep doing this sort of thing...

In any event, I believe there are valuable lessons here. 

Hubris -- excessive pride or self-confidence, arrogance -- is a dangerous enemy.  

"He who the gods would destroy, they first hold high" Euripides tells us.  Has Toyota displayed signs of hubris the past decade?  Did hubris contribute to the breakdown in communication with regulators and in public relations, that Steven talks about?"

Toyota's business system, as I understand it, is designed to make problems visible -- problems in the Design, Make and Sell "loops" -- so that skilled problem solvers can:

a) get to root cause and fix it, and 

b) share the learning gained thereby.  

If so, somewhere the system indeed broke down.

My chums at the company's North American plants have often worried that "we're becoming just another North American car company."  They lament the increasing use of the "iron fist" of the North American management style.

Where there's smoke, there's fire -- or at least a flickering ember or two.

I don't want to be misunderstood.  I've no doubt Toyota will get to root cause & share the learning gained.  I'm confident Toyota will regain its lustre and become a paragon again.  But Toyota, and all great companies need eternal vigilance against their eternal antagonist.

Why is laughter important in business?

Because it makes things small and personal -- and thereby helps to dispel Big Company Disease.

Big companies take themselves seriously. Laughter punctures the balloon and drenches things in the light of sanity.

For organizations big & small, I'd say "embrace your inner smallness".

I give a talk called "Everything I Learned I Learned in a Greek Restaurant"
 
People seem to like it.

Greek restaurants are the epitome of small, fast and funny.

Small and fast always beats big and slow.

That's it.

Pascal

Deming’s 14 Points for Top Management

By Al Norval and Pascal Dennis

Over the Holidays’, I was doing some catch-up reading and went back to some of the basics of Lean. Dr. Deming, the legendary quality guru from the latter half of the 20th century is still as relevant today as he was when he was 20, 30 or 50 years ago. I was struck by how simple yet deep his 14 Points for Management are. Take the first one for example – “Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with aim to become competitive and stay in business and to provide jobs”.


He’s captured the essence of Strategy Deployment or Hoshin Kanri. The role of management is to set a True North, figure out what’s preventing you from delivering it and then align the organization to work towards executing strategies that will deliver it. True North can be defined as a “who and what you want to be as a company” in 3-5 years. It encompasses both the hard business goals that shareholders and financial types like but also the essence of what the company values. We can then test – are we delivering the business objectives we have and more importantly are we achieving them in a way that is consistent with our organizational values so that as we work towards our goals, we aren’t decimating the company and making foolish short term decisions that are inconsistent with our long term True North.

It’s difficult to engage our people in achieving our business objectives if we change True North and our strategic direction every year as we develop a new annual plan. People get confused and give up. Constancy of purpose gives us at stability over time that is very engaging for our people. It doesn’t mean we don’t change ever but we do so slowly and in a controlled manner.

So we focus our people on solving problems to help us achieve our True North and in doing so become competitive, stay in business, and provide jobs for our people just as in Dr. Deming’s first point.