Today marks fifty years since the death of Winston Churchill, a man many historians regard as the greatest person of the twentieth century.

Great doesn’t mean perfect of course. Like many of us, Churchill had his good moments and his misguided ones. He remains a controversial figure, especially among the many people who know nothing about the man. In any case, I believe we can learn a great deal about leadership by studying Churchill, and that these lessons have particular value in the Lean organization.

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No one knows the cost of a defective product. Don’t tell me you do. You know the cost of replacing it, but not the cost of a dissatisfied customer. — Edwards Deming

In my last post I asserted that a customer is a person who receives something of value in exchange for something of value. Many with a mass production mentality will find this definition troubling because it doesn’t require that what is exchanged be tangible.

The reason this definition works, though, is that a thing can be valuable while remaining intangible. Intangibles — things like gratitude — can have great value and, in a few cases, can actually be measured.

An important difference between a mass producer and a Lean organization is that people in the Lean organization consciously and constantly seek to add value that is real, but may be intangible, while mass producers don’t bother.

Let me give two examples of how and why intangibles like gratitude must enter into our decision making.

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