Success is the Enemy of Future Success

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Strategy Deployment begins with True North -- our strategic and philosophical purpose.

True North entails developing a clear picture of

1. Ideal condition, and

2. Target condition.

At the process level, this means answering questions like:

"Is the process behaving as expected?"

Corollaries: Do I understand my process? Is our hypothesis sound? If not, how do we adjust it?

"Is there creative tension in our management process?

Corollaries: Are problems visible? Are we challenging ourselves or simply resting on our oars? True North works much the same at the broad strategic level.

In my view, its purpose, at each "level of magnification", is to create discomfort, and reflection (hansei) thereby.

Wakefulness, if you will.

Success is the enemy of future success.

What quality do outstanding individuals (and organizations) share?

Relentless self-examination -- after defeat, and more importantly, after success.

As evidence, I'd offer Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus, Garry Kasparov, Pablo Picasso, and all great sports teams...

Regards,

Pascal



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

There is No Right Answer in Strategy
Content Follows Form or Acting Your Way to New Thinking
Value & Waste at the Imperial Grill
Value in an Age of Endless Innovation

The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

In an era of breath-taking innovation, is there anything more important?

The ‘Essential Eight Technologies’ – Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Drones, 3-D Printing, Big Data Analytics, and Distributed Ledger Technology (‘Blockchain’) – make disruption almost inevitable.

Prosperity, and in some industries, survival, depends on an organization’s ability to continuously solve complex problems.

And that entails leadership at each level. The internet, our era’s central metaphor, is in my view, an appropriate model of the successful organization.

There is no ‘center’ directing the actions of the myriad nodes. Instead, there is intelligence everywhere solving the relevant problems.

To be sure, Strategy development and deployment, remain core responsibilities of senior leaders. The core questions have to be answered:

Where are we going? How do we get there? What’s preventing us? And the deeper questions: Who are we? What do we believe in?

What is the purpose of the Human Resources function?

1. To grow more leaders
2. To create flexible, capable team members always looking for a better way

Let me suggest that core HR processes – Recruitment, Training & Development, Compensation, Performance and Succession Planning – must evolve accordingly. And so must corresponding methods.

It has to be easy, for example, to measure capability, so we can answer the core problem solving questions: What should be happening? What is actually happening?

A big challenge, given the secondary role HR plays in many organizations!

Deepening & extending the mindset of senior leaders is another big challenge. Most have grown up in a very different world, where developing more leaders was rarely recognized or rewarded.

Much of our LPI practice entails coaching senior leaders. The very best are those who have internalized these ideas. A salient quote: “My job is to develop capability – of people, processes and machinery.”

So what to do? A good start would be to explicitly include ‘Growing Other Leaders’ in performance contracts, and succession planning. (If I may suggest, providing capable coaches also makes sense.)

At our old Toyota plant, if you hadn’t ‘left a footprint’, promotion was out of the question. And so, we focused on creating capability – of people, processes and machinery. It’s how you got promoted.

Toyota’s superb internal senseis helped immeasurably. As did Toyota’s HR processes and policies. It was easy, for example, to measure capability of people, processes and machinery.

Thus, we could apply the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle and practice root cause problem solving. We could run experiments and learn what worked and what did not.

Building the capability of people, interestingly, is not that different from building process capability.

All for now. More to come on this juicy topic.

Best regards,

Pascal



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

Complexity is a Crude State, Simplicity Marks the End of a Process of Refinement
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 4
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 3
The Role of Senior Leaders (Part 1)

Reflections on True North

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Strategy begins with our strategic & philosophical Purpose, also known as True North.

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 (hoshin), a few words defining our purpose, vision, commitment

I encourage leaders to draw a picture of where we want to be, how we’ll get there, and how we will go about our business.

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 of what's possible.

True North is also the ‘tie-breaker’, to which we turn for guidance at critical moments. “Is this who we are? Is this where we’re going and how’ll we get there?”

True North will tell us. For example, imagine we are a designer & manufacturer of high-end lighting solving challenging technical problems in high-margin niche markets. Our hoshin is Speed Style Invention. Now suppose a major automotive company, say Toyota, approached us and said, “We’d like you to manufacture lighting for our next Lexus model.”

How would we respond? The answer is clear, no? “We’ll have to decline, with great respect, because that’s not what we do, that’s not who we are.”

Our annual plans will be simple & modular one-pagers that express our hypotheses. We’re often wrong, but we adjust quickly. Life never goes according to plan. Clear hypotheses & modular plans enable the rapid PDCA cycles that’ll dispel the fog & get us closer and closer to True North.

Strategy Deployment is messy, humbling, intuitive, 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.

Have a good summer, all,

Pascal



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

Frontiers - Lean & IT
Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World
On Big Data
Why Lean Outside the Factory?

You Want to Get More Done? Do Less…

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Continuing with Strategy Deployment today, and highlighting an especially interesting paradox.

How to get more breakthrough activity done?

Do less…

Don’t crowd the Right Hand Side of your strategy A3. (I was taught ‘no more than 5 activities – and even that’s too much!’)

If we have ten countermeasures on the RHS of our paper, do we really understand the strategic problem?

Chances are we’re simply buffering our lack of understanding with volume. (“One of these is sure to have an impact!”)

Fatigue and exhaustion is the risk of course. We have a limited number of hours for improvement activity – often 10% or less of our time.

Surely, we have to use this precious time wisely.

Understanding the ‘less is more’ principle is vital for senior leaders. Remember, everything on your A3 maybe multiplied many times over on baby A3’s.

I’ve been lucky enough to observe great masters of A3 thinking, who are able to distill complex problems down to their essense.

“Here’s our critical gap and root causes. And here are the two things we’re going to do about it…”

‘Says easy, does hard’ – but we have to keep trying.

Best regards,

Pascal




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

Strategy Deployment & Language
Where Lean Has Gone Wrong & What to Do About It, Part 2
Where Lean Has Gone Wrong & What to Do About It, Part 1
What is Courage & What’s It Mean for Strategy?

Strategy Deployment & Language

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

In the beginning was the Word...

So begins the Old Testament, which Canadian scholar Northrop Fry called The Great Code, the blue-print for Western culture.

Indeed, language reflects how we think, how we experience life, and who we are.

What's this got to do with strategy & strategy deployment?
Strategy is story-telling, strategy is language.

But what if our language is foggy? What's a team to make of head-scratchers like the following?

"We will leverage our World Class Operating Capabilities” or “We'll reshape pricing tactics to effectively manage demand while sustaining market access.”

My advice, head for the hills!

Sorry, but such language often means the team is clueless.

"We really don't understand what's happening, so let's slather on the buzzwords!"

I spend much of my time coaching senior leaders. My advice to them?

Ban fuzzy words & phrases!

Out with cliché! Down with the latest buzzwords!

Sayonara to 'leverage,' 'synergy,' 'disintermediation,' and 'robust' -- (to pick just a few).

PLAIN LANGUAGE, PLEASE!

We were lucky at our old Toyota plant.

Our Japanese senseis' grasp of English was very basic, which meant we had to express ourselves clearly & simply.

As a result, despite the language barrier, we communicated beautifully.

Best,

Pascal




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

Where Lean Has Gone Wrong & What to Do About It, Part 2
Where Lean Has Gone Wrong & What to Do About It, Part 1
What is Courage & What’s It Mean for Strategy?
"How Will You Motivate Your Team, Pascal-san?"

Beware INITIATIVES

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Like most people, I went to business and engineering school with the best intentions - get a better job, learn interesting stuff, become a better manager and so on.

But we pick up more than we bargain for - including dysfunctional mental models, which I've written about at length.

We begin to believe that, because we are so smart and well-educated, we can manage from a distance.

And the corollaries:

1. What can front line workers possible teach us?
   


2. Improvement means head office INITIATIVES dreamed up by people -- just like us!
   

Result?

Endless INITIATIVES stream out of head office.

They crowd out real work and often crush our managers and team members.

Everywhere, I see good people struggling under the weight of actual work plus the funny work head office insists on.

Executives are like crows - they like shiny things.

Here's some advice:

1. Resist the temptation
   


2. Put the shiny things on a wall in the Executive metrics room
   


3. Look at them occasionally, but don't do anything
   


4. When the organization has some "white space", pull one off the wall and look at it
   

Then put it back and forget about it.

Here's a reflection point:

At our old Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada plant - we never had INITIATIVES

We had tough performance targets set through Strategy Deployment, and the expectation that we'd figure out root causes & countermeasures.

Result: we focused entirely on making the day's production and improving our management system.

We were free to balance continuous improvement with breakthrough.

We owned our management system.

Best,

Pascal


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

Point, Flow & System Improvement
Andon – Putting Quality at the Forefront
Lean Outside the Factory - Reverse Magic!
The Beauty of Making Things

What Does Breakthrough Mean? - Part 1

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Not understanding Breakthrough - common failure mode in Strategy Deployment.

Too often, our Strategy A3 papers are full of work that's routine or entails continuous incremental improvement.

Our A3 becomes crowded with non-critical stuff & we lose sight of the critical few.

Strategy Deployment is about breakthrough - the few things you will emphasize to take your business to another level.

So how do we come to better understand breakthrough?

Here's a useful technique.

As yourself, "What are five problems, whose solution will transform our business?"

The question is a fractal, and applies at every level of the organization.

The higher the level, the more "play" in defining the "boundary conditions" & "design space".

Sometimes the answer is obvious.

For example, if you're launching a new model in an auto plant, breakthrough might entail:

• Reducing ergonomic burden by 50%
• Improving productivity by 30% (through Waste reduction)

If you're in agriculture, breakthrough might mean:

• Reducing employee absenteeism & turnover by 40%
• Increasing Yield by 30%

But other times, breakthrough is not obvious. We can become stuck in our mental models, unable to see what's all too visible to 'fresh eyes'.

Or as we rise in organization, we can lose touch with the front line, where Value is created.

Other things can hinder us as well.

For now, let's remember the above question - and it's corollary: "Why not?"

As in, "Why not zero injuries, infections, defects, waste...?"

Best,

Pascal


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

Suggestion boxes vs Quick & Easy Kaizen
What is Intellectual Capital?, Part 2
What is Intellectual Capital & Why Should You Care?
Value Stream Maps

The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

In an era of breath-taking innovation, is there anything more important?

The ‘Essential Eight Technologies’ – Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Drones, 3-D Printing, Big Data Analytics, and Distributed Ledger Technology (‘Blockchain’) – make disruption almost inevitable.

Prosperity, and in some industries, survival, depends on an organization’s ability to continuously solve complex problems.

And that entails leadership at each level. The internet, our era’s central metaphor, is in my view, an appropriate model of the successful organization.

There is no ‘center’ directing the actions of the myriad nodes. Instead, there is intelligence everywhere solving the relevant problems.

To be sure, Strategy development and deployment, remain core responsibilities of senior leaders. The core questions have to be answered:

Where are we going? How do we get there? What’s preventing us? And the deeper questions: Who are we? What do we believe in?

What is the purpose of the Human Resources function?

1. To grow more leaders
2. To create flexible, capable team members always looking for a better way

Let me suggest that core HR processes – Recruitment, Training & Development, Compensation, Performance and Succession Planning – must evolve accordingly. And so must corresponding methods.

It has to be easy, for example, to measure capability, so we can answer the core problem solving questions: What should be happening? What is actually happening?

A big challenge, given the secondary role HR plays in many organizations!

Deepening & extending the mindset of senior leaders is another big challenge. Most have grown up in a very different world, where developing more leaders was rarely recognized or rewarded.

Much of our LPI practice entails coaching senior leaders. The very best are those who have internalized these ideas. A salient quote: “My job is to develop capability – of people, processes and machinery.”

So what to do? A good start would be to explicitly include ‘Growing Other Leaders’ in performance contracts, and succession planning. (If I may suggest, providing capable coaches also makes sense.)

At our old Toyota plant, if you hadn’t ‘left a footprint’, promotion was out of the question. And so, we focused on creating capability – of people, processes and machinery. It’s how you got promoted.

Toyota’s superb internal senseis helped immeasurably. As did Toyota’s HR processes and policies. It was easy, for example, to measure capability of people, processes and machinery.

Thus, we could apply the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle and practice root cause problem solving. We could run experiments and learn what worked and what did not.

Building the capability of people, interestingly, is not that different from building process capability.

All for now. More to come on this juicy topic.

Best regards,

Pascal

Reflections on True North

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

A New Year, and a new strategic cycle. Strategy begins with our strategic & philosophical Purpose, also known as True North.

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 (hoshin), a few words defining our purpose, vision, commitment

I encourage leaders to draw a picture of where we want to be, how we’ll get there, and how we will go about our business.

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 of what's possible.

True North is also the ‘tie-breaker’, to which we turn for guidance at critical moments. “Is this who we are? Is this where we’re going and how’ll we get there?”

True North will tell us. For example, imagine we are a designer & manufacturer of high-end lighting solving challenging technical problems in high-margin niche markets. Our hoshin is Speed Style Invention. Now suppose a major automotive company, say Toyota, approached us and said, “We’d like you to manufacture lighting for our next Lexus model.”

How would we respond? The answer is clear, no? “We’ll have to decline, with great respect, because that’s not what we do, that’s not who we are.”

Our annual plans will be simple & modular one-pagers that express our hypotheses. We’re often wrong, but we adjust quickly. Life never goes according to plan. Clear hypotheses & modular plans enable the rapid PDCA cycles that’ll dispel the fog & get us closer and closer to True North.

Strategy Deployment is messy, humbling, intuitive, 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.

Have a good year, all,

Pascal

Strategy Deployment & Language

By Pascal Dennis

In the beginning was the Word...

So begins the Old Testament, which Canadian scholar Northrop Fry called The Great Code, the blue-print for Western culture.

Indeed, language reflects how we think, how we experience life, and who we are.

What's this got to do with strategy & strategy deployment?

Strategy is story-telling, strategy is language.

But what if our language is foggy? What's a team to make of head-scratchers like the following?

"We will leverage our World Class Operating Capabilities” or “We'll reshape pricing tactics to effectively manage demand while sustaining market access.”

My advice, head for the hills!

Sorry, but such language often means the team is clueless.

"We really don't understand what's happening, so let's slather on the buzzwords!"

I spend much of my time coaching senior leaders. My advice to them?

Ban fuzzy words & phrases!

Out with cliché! Down with the latest buzzwords!

Sayonara to 'leverage,' 'synergy,' 'disintermediation,' and 'robust' -- (to pick just a few).

PLAIN LANGUAGE, PLEASE!

We were lucky at our old Toyota plant.

Our Japanese senseis' grasp of English was very basic, which meant we had to express ourselves clearly & simply.

As a result, despite the language barrier, we communicated beautifully.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise: Success is the Enemy of Future Success

By Pascal Dennis

Strategy Deployment begins with True North -- our strategic and philosophical purpose.

True North entails developing a clear picture of

1. Ideal condition, and



2. Target condition.

At the process level, this means answering questions like:

"Is the process behaving as expected?"

Corollaries: Do I understand my process? Is our hypothesis sound? If not, how do we adjust it?

"Is there creative tension in our management process?

Corollaries: Are problems visible? Are we challenging ourselves or simply resting on our oars?

True North works much the same at the broad strategic level.

In my view, its purpose, at each "level of magnification", is to create discomfort, and reflection (hansei) thereby.

Wakefulness, if you will.

Success is the enemy of future success.

What quality do outstanding individuals (and organizations) share?

Relentless self-examination -- after defeat, and more importantly, after success.

As evidence, I'd offer Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus, Garry Kasparov, Pablo Picasso, and all great sports teams...

Regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

You Want to Get More Done? Do Less…

By Pascal Dennis

Trust you all are enjoying the arrival of Spring, as we are here in the Great White North.

(For our colleagues in the southern hemisphere, trust you’re enjoying fine autumn weather.)

Thanks for the fine feedback back on my earlier blog – ‘Strategy is About Saying No.”

More on Strategy Deployment today, building on last blog, and highlighting an especially interesting paradox.

How to get more breakthrough activity done?

Do less…

Don’t crowd the Right Hand Side of your strategy A3. (I was taught ‘no more than 5 activities – and even that’s too much!’)

If we have ten countermeasures on the RHS of our paper, do we really understand the strategic problem?

Chances are we’re simply buffering our lack of understanding with volume. (“One of these is sure to have an impact!”)

Fatigue and exhaustion is the risk of course. We have a limited number of hours for improvement activity – often 10% or less of our time.

Surely, we have to use this precious time wisely.

Understanding the ‘less is more’ principle is vital for senior leaders. Remember, everything on your A3 maybe multiplied many times over on baby A3’s.

I’ve been lucky enough to observe great masters of A3 thinking, who are able to distill complex problems down to their essense.

“Here’s our critical gap and root causes. And here are the two things we’re going to do about it…”

‘Says easy, does hard’ – but we have to keep trying.

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

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, Andy & Me and the Hospital (Spring 2016) 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

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

Success is the Enemy of Future Success - Reprise

By Pascal Dennis

Strategy Deployment begins with True North -- our strategic and philosophical purpose.

True North entails developing a clear picture of

1. Ideal condition, and

2. Target condition.

At the process level, this means answering questions like:

"Is the process behaving as expected?"

Corollaries: Do I understand my process? Is our hypothesis sound? If not, how do we adjust it?

"Is there creative tension in our management process?

Corollaries: Are problems visible? Are we challenging ourselves or simply resting on our oars?

True North works much the same at the broad strategic level.

In my view, its purpose, at each "level of magnification", is to create discomfort, and reflection (hansei) thereby.

Wakefulness, if you will.

Success is the enemy of future success.

What quality do outstanding individuals (and organizations) share?

Relentless self-examination -- after defeat, and more importantly, after success.

As evidence, I'd offer Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus, Garry Kasparov, Pablo Picasso, and all great sports teams...

Regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Strategy Deployment and the Improvement Kata

By Pascal Dennis

My friend and colleague Mike Rother wrote a fine book a few years back called Toyota Kata.

In it he described the problem solving process I was lucky enough to learn at Toyota manufacturing.

Mike astutely called it the “improvement kata”, invoking the martial arts concept of a core routine that you practice over and over.

(Our readers may recall that I am an Aikido practitioner of some commitment, and questionable ability. Aikido has provided me with good health, flexibility (physical at least), and copious metaphors.)

How does the improvement kata relate to Strategy Deployment (aka Hoshin Kanri)?

Strategy Deployment’s core steps are:

1. Develop the plan


2. Deploy the plan


3. Monitor the plan, and


4. Improve the system

Strategy Deployment is a planning and execution system whose process entails continually surfacing problems – so we can fix them.

Step 4 entails harvesting all the now visible problems. How do we do that?

In our coaching practice we teach multiple methods – Problem Solving A3’s, Quick and Easy Kaizen (Kaizen Teian) – and the improvement kata

There’s no one best way – you pick the tool that’s most helpful. Each of these tools, in fact, is informed by the same powerful algorithm our Toyota senseis taught us all those years ago.

At Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, everything reinforced the core steps and problem solving was like breathing. (Interested readers are referred to Chapter 5 of The Remedy)

But that’s not true in many organizations. We find people benefit from practicing core problem solving routines, the same way I benefit when I practice core Aikido movements.

Thanks, Mike.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Success is the Enemy of Future Success

By Pascal Dennis

Strategy Deployment begins with True North -- our strategic and philosophical purpose.

True North entails developing a clear picture of

1. Ideal condition, and

2. Target condition.

At the process level, this means answering questions like:

"Is the process behaving as expected?"

Corollaries: Do I understand my process? Is our hypothesis sound? If not, how do we adjust it?

"Is there creative tension in our management process?

Corollaries: Are problems visible? Are we challenging ourselves or simply resting on our oars? True North works much the same at the broad strategic level.

In my view, its purpose, at each "level of magnification", is to create discomfort, and reflection (hansei) thereby.

Wakefulness, if you will.

Success is the enemy of future success.

What quality do outstanding individuals (and organizations) share?

Relentless self-examination -- after defeat, and more importantly, after success.

As evidence, I'd offer Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus, Garry Kasparov, Pablo Picasso, and all great sports teams...

Regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise - Beware Initiatives

By Pascal Dennis

Like most people, I went to business and engineering school with the best intentions - get a better job, learn interesting stuff, become a better manager and so on.

But we pick up more than we bargain for - including dysfunctional mental models, which I've written about at length.

We begin to believe that, because we are so smart and well-educated, we can manage from a distance.

And the corollaries:

1. What can front line workers possible teach us?
   


2. Improvement means head office INITIATIVES dreamed up by people -- just like us!
   

Result?

Endless INITIATIVES stream out of head office.

They crowd out real work and often crush our managers and team members.

Everywhere, I see good people struggling under the weight of actual work plus the funny work head office insists on.

Executives are like crows - they like shiny things.

Here's some advice:

1. Resist the temptation
   


2. Put the shiny things on a wall in the Executive metrics room
   


3. Look at them occasionally, but don't do anything
   


4. When the organization has some "white space", pull one off the wall and look at it
   

Then put it back and forget about it.

Here's a reflection point:

At our old Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada plant - we never had INITIATIVES

We had tough performance targets set through Strategy Deployment, and the expectation that we'd figure out root causes & countermeasures.

Result: we focused entirely on making the day's production and improving our management system.

We were free to balance continuous improvement with breakthrough.

We owned our management system.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Success is the Enemy of Future Success

By Pascal Dennis

Strategy Deployment begins with True North -- our strategic and philosophical Purpose.

True North entails developing a clear picture of

1. Ideal condition, and

2. Target condition

At the process level, this means answering questions like:

"Is the process behaving as expected?"

Corollaries: Do I understand my process? Is our hypothesis sound? If not, how do we adjust it?

"Is there creative tension in our management process?

Corollaries: Are problems visible? Are we challenging ourselves or simply resting on our oars?

True North works much the same at the broad strategic level.

In my view, its purpose, at each "level of magnification", is to create discomfort, and reflection (hansei) thereby.

Wakefulness, if you will.

Success is the enemy of future success.

What quality do outstanding individuals (and organizations) share?

Relentless self-examination -- after defeat, and more importantly, after success.

As evidence, I'd offer Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus, Garry Kasparov, Pablo Picasso, and all great sports teams...

Regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio