All Posts Tagged With: "lean"
Harvard Business Review’s Most Influential Management Ideas of the Decade
Everybody has a Top 10 list and HBR is no different. Well, they’re a little different: Their editors came up with the Top 12 most influential management ideas since 2000 (“The Decade in Management Ideas,” Julia Kirby, January 1, 2010):
1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy. And not a good one. Even the guy who popularized it concurs. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” said Jack Welch. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.”
2. IT as a Utility. Cloud computing is the latest step toward buying computing capabilities as services.
3. The Customer Chorus. Technical and social developments have given customers a stronger and more pervasive voice—and companies are finding ways to listen.
4. Enterprise Risk Management. Chief risk officers hold the new umbrella over pockets of risk that had been scattered, and addressed separately, throughout the organization.
5. The Creative Organization. The ability to produce creative output was seen as a competitive advantage to encourage through collaboration and diverse perspectives.
6. Open Source. Wikipedia, which represents the power of open source, was born in 2001.
7. Going Private. According to the article, “As the decade wore on, private equity’s playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management,” especially in the areas of strategic focus and governance.
8. Behavioral Economics. Rational thought alone does not explain human decision-making. Yup, that’s the 2000’s in a nutshell.
9. High Potentials. Some managers are more equal than others and you would be smart to develop them.
10. Competing on Analytics. The data you collect…
4Jan2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Next Big Thing?
A couple years ago a consultant friend asked me what I thought the next big thing would be after Six Sigma and Lean. I didn’t have an answer, but BusinessWeek thinks it knows.
It’s called jugaad, and it’s “fast becoming the latest buzzword in academic and management consulting circles” (“From India, the Latest Management Fad,” Reena Jana, BusinessWeek, December 2, 2009).
Pronounced joo-gaardh, jugaad is a Hindi slang word that means innovation to meet a customer’s immediate needs using scarce resources. Literally translated, it means “put-together contraption that moves.” In India, it’s commonly used to describe vehicles made out of whatever materials are available, most notably water pump sets that are converted into engines. According to Wikipedia, “the brakes of these vehicles very often fail and one of the passengers jumps down and applies a wooden block as a brake.”
If you don’t think that’s much of a threat to replace Six Sigma, you’re not thinking big enough. McKinsey consultants have begun discussing jugaad principles with their clients. Even Best Buy and Oracle are using jugaad to create more economical products and services.
We’re probably lucky they don’t build cars.
Still, the idea behind jugaad—innovation that is affordable and scalable—sounds appealing. Distancing it from its shoddy reputation will require a new horde of experts who can create a methodology that incorporates Six Sigma standards, Lean efficiency, and jugaad innovation.
Umm, excuse me while I call my consultant friend about that next big thing.
8Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedOrganizational Improvement Training
The Alliance for Performance Excellence offers inexpensive online training on a broad range of organizational improvement topics. I can’t vouch for the quality of the training because I haven’t taken a course, but training provided by the Alliance, which is a network of Baldrige-based award programs, should be excellent.
Click here to review a complete list of courses on such subjects as:
- Control charts
- Customer service excellence
- Data-driven decision making
- Lean
- Problem solving
- Process management
- Quality tools
- Six Sigma
- Statistical process control
If you take an online course through the Alliance or have taken one, let us know what you think by commenting on this article or sending us an email.
10Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedReengineering Revisited
The reengineering revolution was poised to take off when Michael Hammer wrote a book with that title in 1995. It sputtered. Organizations had little time and even less desire to dump their processes and start over on blank sheets of paper.
The revolution was too daunting, but the ideas behind it remain valid. I was reminded of this as I was reading the book, Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation, by Ric Merrifield (FT Press, 2009). He notes that seeking advice from people who actually do the work “tends to be more confusing than helpful. That’s because employees and managers…think of their jobs in terms of how they do them rather than what they are intended to accomplish.”
It’s always a good thing to involve the people working a process in improving that process, but you have to be careful not to lose sight of what that process is intended to accomplish. In Baldrige terms, that means being clear about whom the process serves and what the customers of that process require. It also means systematically evaluating key processes to identify opportunities for reengineering.
That’s one of the great benefits of a Lean kaizen event: Fresh eyes tear apart a process that has been running the same way for years and design a new process that is better and faster. And it takes less than a week.
The Baldrige Criteria ask: “How do you design and innovate your work processes to meet all the key requirements?” Some form of reengineering,…
3Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Most Popular Improvement Tools
The list comes from the Global Benchmarking Network’s 2008 survey on business improvement and benchmarking. Which of these does your organization use?
- Mission and vision statement
- Customer/client surveys
- SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats)
- Informal benchmarking (encouraging employees to learn from other organizations)
- Quality management system (think ISO)
- Improvement teams
- Employee suggestion scheme
- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
- Performance benchmarking (comparing process/activity performance levels)
- Knowledge management
- Business process reengineering
- Balanced scorecard
- TQM (total quality management)
- Business excellence (using Baldrige, EFQM, or other national excellence models)
- Best practice benchmarking (structured process for comparing performance and implementing best practices)
- Corporate social responsibility system
- Lean
- Industrial housekeeping (5S)
- Quality function deployment (QFD)
- Six Sigma
More than 450 responses from 44 countries ranked their organizations’ usage of these improvement tools in the order above. The percent of usage ranged from 77% for “mission and vision statement” to 22% for Six Sigma. Every tool from the top through PDCA was used by more than half the respondents; the rest were used by fewer than half.
The Baldrige message is a good news/bad news deal: “Business excellence” is currently being used by just 40% of the respondents, which is pretty good considering that only 59% said they understood what the “business excellence” tool is.
You can read a summary of the survey here.
Help grow our community: 
Lean and Baldrige
In “Lean Projects Are Defined by Lean Behaviors,” Hal, the author of the article, writes, “Lean is a mindset. It’s not a set of practices.” The same is true for Baldrige. He points out how lean has “a constant focus on learning…learning from everything that happens on an everyday basis. Lean companies are learning faster than their competitors.” That’s also true of Baldrige companies: Organizational and personal learning is a Baldrige core value.
I saw the parallels between Lean and Baldrige a few years ago when I contributed to a book on Lean called The Antidote: How to Transform your Business for the Extreme Challenges of the 21st Century. The book’s authors, Anand Sharma and Gary Hourselt, are senior leaders at TBM Consulting Group, a global leader in business performance improvement and the effective implementation of Lean. In a section of the book that defines transformational management systems, Sharma and Hourselt seem to be describing a Baldrige organization:
They execute superbly. To integrate a new management system, an organization has to change. Roles and responsibilities change. Expectations change. The culture changes. To successfully manage this change, companies must execute their plans day after day, month after month, and year after year. This isn’t another “flavor of the month.” It’s not a short-term commitment.
Baldrige, like Lean, is more than just an improvement tool: It’s a way of thinking. Organizations are transformed by integrating the Baldrige model. They think and act differently and they, too, “execute superbly.”
Several Baldrige Award recipients use Lean to improve the quality…
19Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHospitals Avoid Lean and Six Sigma
Healthcare has been a boon to the Baldrige Award, accounting for roughly half of all applicants over the last few years. To support their drive for performance excellence, hospitals and medical centers are also adapting lean and Six Sigma methodologies to improve quality, cycle time, and productivity.
At least, that was the impression.
In “Get Your Checkup” in the August 2009 edition of Quality Progress (you must be a member of ASQ to read the article), the ASQ Lean Six Sigma Hospital Study Advisory Committee reports on the results of an online questionnaire returned by 77 hospitals. While the small number of participants prevents sweeping conclusions, the study provides early indicators of the deployment of lean and Six Sigma in hospital settings.
According to the survey, 4.2% of hospitals have deployed lean, 8.2% have deployed Six Sigma, and 5.7% have deployed Lean Six Sigma. At the other end of the spectrum, 91.6% have zero to minor deployment of lean, 83.5% zero to minor deployment of Six Sigma, and 90% zero to minor deployment of Lean Six Sigma.
To their credit, the authors manage to build a six-page article filled with impressive tables out the experiences of a handful of hospitals, but even they eventually admit that there’s not much there:
“Based on those findings from a small sample, it would also be easy to question whether lean and Six Sigma have real, broad impact across hospitals nationwide, rather than just in isolated departments, or any ability to close the gap between good and bad metrics.”
Of course,…
10Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
