Despite the many ways that Lean transitions can fail in American business, they most often fail because of disordered personalities wreaking havoc in the organization and throwing Lean efforts off track. The harm that a single person with a disordered personality can do to an organization, even from a middle management or lower level, is difficult to believe if you don’t witness it yourself.

From the point of view of somebody trying to lead a Lean transition, the destructiveness of these people is difficult to detect if you aren’t yet accustomed to thinking in terms of a system, and/or if you haven’t yet learned to pay very careful attention to details. What’s more, these people with disordered personalities are often superficially very charming, and can be astonishingly good liars. You can’t run a Lean organization with creatures like this.

Here is an excellent primer on the interaction between leadership and personality.

More background on the video and the people who produced and appear in it is available here.

Copyright 2015 by Paul G. Spring. All rights reserved.