The original Cadillac Ranch, Amarillo, Texas. Photo courtesy of John P. of onemansblog.com.

Can Toyota, Cadillac, a bunch of rock musicians from New Jersey and a classical composer who lived in Austria two centuries ago have anything in common?

Yup, they can.

Toyota, Beethoven, and Bruce Springsteen with The E-Street Band all understand the care required in orchestrating what they do (I’ll get to the Cadillac part in a minute). Toyota uses takt time in coordinating the production of the Camry, and musicians have for centuries used variants of takt time to write down and coordinate the performance of their music. Learning how great music is made can give insights into how important timing is in the creation of other great products.

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Here is an interesting interview with Bob Lutz, who for many decades served in management and on the boards of auto-industry companies worldwide, including GM, Ford, Chrysler, BMW, and Lotus. The interview panel is perhaps a bit nerdy, but is a good one, comprising journalists and consultants with many years of experience in the auto industry.

Lutz has an interesting perspective from the point of view of Lean in that he describes some of the problematic attitudes that plagued the old mass-production versions of the American auto companies – attitudes that are still fairly common in American business. In addition, his insistence on understanding and meeting the needs of the customer is very much a core principle in Lean organizations.

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Mass production operations often have what they call work standards. They are really nothing more than quotas. In too many cases, whatever you do to fill that quota is fine, which is why mass production operations can put out such poor quality and be such barbaric places to work.

Lean operations have what sounds like a similar sort of thing: standard work. However, standard work and work standards are very different.

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Some people make Lean much too difficult.

Recently I stopped by to see my friend Gerry at the restaurant he manages. He had just hired some young students to work part-time during the summer, and was training them intermittently as he went about his regular duties. Although Gerry knows almost nothing of Lean, I was struck by the Lean touches he has developed intuitively in his business. It’s worth a look.

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NASCAR Trucks race at Pocono. It’s difficult to explain even to many Americans, let alone Japanese and Europeans, the appeal of this quintessentially American cultural phenomenon; too much is lost in translation from one culture to another.

Occasionally people object that kaizen doesn’t mean, as I have often said it does, “virtuous change”. Technically, that’s true, but kaizen doesn’t mean “continuous improvement” either. Both are an attempt to capture the meaning of kaizen within Japanese culture.

Effectively translating words from one language to another can be a challenge, but translating ideas (like kaizen) is often even more difficult. Humor is more difficult yet. In fact, sometimes it’s very difficult even to translate from British English to American English, or from American English in one part of the U.S.A. to American English in another part.

With that in mind, here are a few examples to keep in mind the next time you have trouble understanding what a Japanese word means:

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One of the great challenges in effecting a Lean transformation in American business is accounting for the enormous cultural differences between Japan and the U.S.A. Among those differences, and probably the most difficult to overcome, is the culture of self-examination, or “hansei”, which is so important in Japan, and the culture of self-esteem, which has become so common and so destructive in the United States.

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The zipper on my trusty knapsack recently failed after many years of constant service. Searching for a replacement, I stumbled upon an item that hints at what kaizen really means as a part of Japanese culture. It can be enlightening to anybody who really wants to understand Lean.
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Watching people trying to wrap their heads around the idea of Lean as more than a set of tools copied piecemeal from Toyota, I have noticed a two-stage problem.

First, people don’t understand what a system is, so they can’t, as Edwards Deming implored, “Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service…”

Second, they don’t understand how a Lean system differs from a mass production system.

These aren’t really all that difficult to understand, and they are really important, so let’s take a look at them.

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I recently had to sit through a meeting at which a few people proudly tossed into the air such trendy terms as “thinking outside the box,” and “internal customer”.

They seemed oblivious to the fact that “thinking outside the box” is such a commonplace today that its invocation signals its exact opposite, that is, an utter lack of thought that fits neatly within the confines of the very small and conventional cardboard shipping box it arrived in.

But what about “internal customer”? Surely that is a good insight, is it not?

It is not.

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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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