Hubris and Ethics

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Hubris is the ancient Greek word for arrogance, excessive pride or self-confidence.

Hubris is a common root cause of unethical behavior and, arguably, the most dangerous enemy of great companies.

(Check out this fine book on hubris and the Enron catastrophe entitled The Smartest Guys in the Room.)

What's the countermeasure to hubris?

Humility -- the extreme awareness of limits, of standards, of all that we are not. Humility is one of the Great Virtues, and underlies Prudence, Temperance, Courage and Justice.

Justice, for example, is only possible if we’re humble enough to accept a higher standard or code.

Visual management, 5 S, standardized work and all the other elements of the Lean business system are designed to keep us humble.

Our old Toyota plant in Cambridge Ontario won many awards. "How could they give us an award?" we'd wonder. "We're so screwed up..."

We need great companies -- they show us what's possible.

And great companies need humility - for the same reason.

Best,

Pascal




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

TPS and Agile
Lean Means Don’t Be a Dumb-Ass
Scatter - Our Nemesis
The Biggest Weakness is Contemporary Business Culture?

Reflection - the Breakfast of Champions

By Pascal Dennis

Reflection entails. honest, humble acceptance of successes & failures, strengths & weaknesses.

Hansei, as the Japanese call it.

Reflection is the countermeasure to hubris, overweening pride & arrogance, that destroyer of people and organization.

Reflection is central to all great religions, in the form of prayer, meditation, and rumination.

In some traditions the acolyte leaves civilization and seeks reflection in solitude.

In my experience, reflection requires both solitude, as well as, the camaraderie of one's team.

Thus, questions like 'What have I learned?’ naturally lead to 'What did we learn?'

Reflection, of course, reflects the Adjust phase of Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle.

We close of the loop thereby, and lay the foundation for next year's PDCA loop.

A couple of points here:

To close the loop, we need to observe each PDCA phase.

Otherwise, we suffer the debilitating ailment I call Scatter - one group does the Plan, another Deploys the Plan, yet a third Checks the Plan.

Result: lousy results and little learning.

Scatter is at epidemic proportions, especially in large organizations.

So important activities need a deployment leader, ‘key thinker’, ‘chief engineer’ or equivalent to ‘wrap their arms around the problem’, observe each PDCA phase, and thereby harvest & share the learning.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise: Lean – Where are We Now? - Part 2

By Pascal Dennis

Last time, I invoked nature’s sigmoid curve and asked:

1. Where on the curve are we now? Are we still in the state of accelerated growth – or has Lean leveled off?

2. If the latter, how to create a new sigmoid curve? What are the obstacles and possible countermeasures?

These questions have triggered fine discussions within our Lean Pathways team and among all our friends & colleagues.

Seems the consensus is that Lean is levelling off and approaching a plateau. Lean has ‘won’, if you will.

Lean/Continuous Improvement has developed roots in most Fortune 500 companies, and across a broad range of industries.

We have a significant and growing number of splendid Lean organizations.

It would be easy to rest on our oars. But if we did, we’d risk the fate of numerous other worthy “improvement” paradigms (e.g. TQM, Business Process Reengineering et al).

Here’s our next challenge: How do we get a new sigmoid curve going?

In my view, the key to generating a new upswing for Lean is two-fold:

1. Double down on the principles and thinking behind Lean, and

2. Extend Lean thinking upstream and downstream of Operations

I’ve written a book {The Remedy] & blogged extensively on number 2.

What about number 1? Increasingly, Lean is taught as a set of tools and practices – each worthy and helpful in their own right. Visual management, 5 S, standardized work et al are splendid, effective practices – necessary, but not sufficient. For a start, they’re unlikely to seize the imagination of, say, a Chief Information Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, or Chief Medical Officer – or of a CEO, for that matter. I spend much of my time coaching such folks. They see the tools of Lean as ‘Operations’ stuff – helpful, but not transformational.

But the ideas & principles underlying Lean are as profound as those underlying medicine, law or engineering, or any great profession. I was trained as a Chemical Engineer and learned the principles of heat transfer, mass transfer, fluid mechanics, unit operations and more. I understood that my job was to apply these principles in ever more complex situations – hence their power.

Lean principles are as powerful and as eternal, in my view. We need to teach them as such, and challenge ourselves to apply them in more & more challenging and complex situations. How well we do this will determine Lean’s trajectory over the next few decades. (It’s the challenge to which we at Lean Pathways have dedicated ourselves.)

Our nemeses in this great endeavour? Arrogance (Hubris), complacency, fear – the eternal trifecta.

Should be an interesting year - and decade.

Best, Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Hubris and Ethics

By Pascal Dennis

Hubris is the ancient Greek word for arrogance, excessive pride or self-confidence.

Hubris is a common root cause of unethical behavior and, arguably, the most dangerous enemy of great companies.

(Check out this fine book on hubris and the Enron catastrophe entitled The Smartest Guys in the Room.)

What's the countermeasure to hubris?

Humility -- the extreme awareness of limits, of standards, of all that we are not. Humility is one of the Great Virtues, and underlies Prudence, Temperance, Courage and Justice.

Justice, for example, is only possible if we’re humble enough to accept a higher standard or code.

Visual management, 5 S, standardized work and all the other elements of the Lean business system are designed to keep us humble.

Our old Toyota plant in Cambridge Ontario won many awards. "How could they give us an award?" we'd wonder. "We're so screwed up..."

We need great companies -- they show us what's possible.

And great companies need humility - for the same reason.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Hubris, Obamacare, and the Magic Phrase

By Pascal Dennis

Our regular readers may recall, I'm a big proponent of Lean in the civil service.

We need excellence in government, and the Lean Business system is, in my view, the perfect vehicle.

The obstacles are many, not the least of which is, the lack of competition.

If you need a licence, permit, or any government-provided document or service, where you gonna go?

There's another obstacle, in full view, in the Obamacare fiasco.

The roll-out of the new Federal health insurance marketplace -- the 'biggest start-up in the world' -- has been scuppered by an ancient antagonist, hubris.

Hubris means arrogance, or over-bearing pride. Hubris prevents us from saying, 'I don't know, 'I'm not sure', or 'Let's bring in some folks who've done this before'.

'I don't know' is a magic phrase, which opens doors, engages people, and makes growth possible. 'I don't know' is an important element of hansei, or humble reflection.

Pretending you know, when you don't, closes doors and makes improvement & growth become impossible. Trust is undermined.

(In fact, wise leaders often stay mum, even when they do know! Not giving your team the answer, and letting them learn for themselves, can provide superb learning!)

Check out the Washington Post's damning investigation of how the White House repeatedly ignored warnings that it was headed for disaster.

In May 2010, senior advisor & Harvard prof, David Cutler, warned the White House,

"You're running the biggest start-up in the world, and don't have anyone who has ever run a start-up, or even run a business..."

Cutler's warning, like so many others, was ignored.

Evidently, senior White House staff lacked the courage to admit, 'I don't know. Let's bring in some folks folk do know.'

And so, dear friends & colleagues in both the private & public sectors, let's remember the magic phrase:

I don't know...

Best,

Pascal

Hubris

By Pascal Dennis

My blog, "The Illusion of Top-Down Control", generated lively comment!

Thanks, all.

Several people asked, "Why are some leaders so arrogant as to believe they can manage from a distance, without involving the front line, without getting their hands dirty?"

Here are a few thoughts:

We're seeing a "splitting" in society -- in income, at the very least.

Those fortunate few who are well connected, or whose parents pave the way to business & professional schools, or who are smart & simply work their butts off, are reaping outsized rewards.

Often they live in 'gated' communities, further isolating them.

I'd guess some begin to believe, "I achieved this by myself -- because I'm smart, talented and hard-working!"

Hubris...

Our senseis at Toyota Cambridge had a good countermeasure

Regular butt-kickings on the shop floor! Fair, firm, and (in my case) usually well-deserved.

"Always so difficult with you Pascal-san!"

"You have learned nothing, Pascal-san."

"This is NOT countermeasure!"

Our senseis made us to face up to reality:

1. the weaknesses in our management systems,
   


2. the problems we didn't understand well enough to solve, and so on.
   

So, perhaps another root cause of this debilitating, isolating hubris, is not enough senseis.

When it comes to hubris, we'd be wise to remember Euripides:

"He who the gods would destroy, they first hold high."

Arrogant, out-of-touch leaders degrade their organizations, and ultimately, their society.

Even if you, personally, emerge unscathed, your children and grandchildren will not.

Best,

Pascal

Corporate Complacency and Arrogance

By Al Norval

I was reading the local newspaper last weekend and came across this article about the impending demise of Kodak. The article caught my interest since I used to work at Kodak. Although I no longer have any ties with the company, I do follow them and my heart goes out to them with the troubles they are in.

What really caught my attention was not just the story of Kodak but the underlying story of corporate hubris and what David Olive, the author calls “the corrosive effect of complacency”.

Here’s a link to the article: The Last Picture Show

Unlike today, Kodak in the past was a wildly successful company. But as we often see, success today is the forerunner of failure tomorrow. Why? Organizations come to believe their success is due to an inherent superiority they have and even worse, that this superiority will go on forever.

The ancient Greeks called this hubris, a word that means overconfident pride or arrogance. Hubris is often associated with a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence or capabilities. This leads to complacency which is when the rot begins to set in. We become insulated and don’t react well to changes in the marketplace or to changes in technology. We continue to believe that what was successful in the past will be successful in the future and we begin a long decline.

The article also gives some great examples of organizations who have pulled themselves out of this decline and have re-invented themselves with IBM being a classic. What did it take? Strong Leadership with a vision of where the organization needed to go. We call this vision True North and along with Strategy Deployment (Hoshin Kanri) to align and focus the organization, these organizations became leaders in their field again. That’s not to say it didn’t also take a lot of hard work.

The lessons from these stories can be summarized as:

1. Stay humble
   
2. Understand what drives customer value
   
3. Grasp the Current Condition
   
4. Reflect honestly
   
5. Stretch the organization to True North
   

All organizations have their ups and downs but following these lessons will allow for more ups than downs.

Cheers