Last week, a bit of a discussion occurred on the blog, in response to my post, "Raising Awareness of ROWE and Lean" I was happy to see all of the comments, and especially enjoyed the points of view from some those whose primary background is in Lean. While I still think there's a significant place within Lean for ROWE-based management styles, I also found the challenges to some of my assumptions to be quite thought-provoking. Clearly, this is not an idea that has reached its full maturity.
Last week, I posted a question on Linked In: Are Lean/Six Sigma and ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) complimentary, or competing, approaches to workplace transformation? Both place a heavy emphasis on value and the elimination of any activities that don't produce that value. Lean, however, advocates an engaged management that is able to "go to Gemba." In gemba, leaders can observe where value is created in order to find waste and identify areas for improvement. ROWE, however, places a heavy emphasis on worker autonomy and freedom, as long as the Results are achieved. This could lead to the Gemba being anywhere...
I had a conversation recently with someone who is clearly very smart, and a successful business owner. I was taken by surprise, however, when I asked this person how they control for spuriousness in their claims that a particular action led to improved performance. The reply was: I operate more on gut and intuition than science, and because crunching numbers doesn’t delight our customers, I don’t do it. I found that particularly curious, and remarked that it is at odds with most process improvement schools of thought. (I did make a mental note, however, that it might be possible...
At some time you’re going to face serious adversity. Maybe you already have. Your crisis may be an internal or external one, but it will come. The more extensive your leadership reach, the more likely you are to face these situations. The impact can be disastrous for your business and for you personally. Just ask executives at Toyota or BP. Once you’re there, the only thing that matters is your ability to navigate through the storm. While each situation is unique, and there is no prescriptive formula for success, you’ve got to carefully manage these five things or you...
I have a dilemma. Since I have been blogging about ROWE and contemplating the virtual workspace, it is at odds with my affinity for Lean Thinking and, especially, the concepts of going to Gemba and Leader Standard Work. If process excellence is facilitated by having Leaders go to where the work takes place, how can this same process excellence be gained when workers are at home in their pajamas, banging away on laptops?
It's not acceptable to say that today's misery is acceptable as long as it's not as bad as what the other guy is doing. Even if we do not know of a better way, we should be diligent in our minds about whether or not something is tolerable. How often do we see underperforming departments, but continue to let them limp along? How often do we see wasteful practices and ignore the problems? Worse yet, how many senior members of the management team actively thwart their subordinates' attempts at sharing information and voicing criticism?
All business is, to one degree or another, a volume business. The size of a business is determined by its revenues. While nearly every improvement school focuses on lowering costs – do they help to increase revenue? Most businesses will live within a certain margin that is reasonable within the company’s industry. True growth, however, occurs by selling more and increasing the volume of dollars flowing in. So, how can a business see the impact of adopting progressive cultural experiments on total, overall dollars at its disposal? If you had asked me up until a...
What's being done right now to make sure that the workforce they have today will be able to meet the needs of the future, or will we be hearing about this labor market mismatch in the future, too? Are businesses really just hoping that the right graduates come out of college with the necessary skills, or that mid-career pros will be able to utilize existing skills in entirely new ways, or are they providing guidance and resources so that the labor pool stays stocked with talent?
I think we’ve all encountered the senior manager who has been assigned to “fix” a dysfunctional chunk of the organization. Typically, they come in with a great many ideas, usually born from experiences in other situations, and then they begin to implement the tools that worked elsewhere. There’s often a short period of enthusiasm, if not grudging acceptance, but things tend to slip backwards in time and, eventually, the organization returns to a state very similar to where it began. The problems that the person was facing never really went away, and the attempts at treatment proved to be...
It is because of fear that we look at change as being too hard. We believe the obstacles insurmountable. The deck is stacked against us, or maybe we just don’t know how – so we fear looking foolish if we fail. So we don’t try. We throw things on the Too Hard pile and forget about them. We throw them there, so we don’t try and we just accept. We accept until we start to believe things are this way for a reason. We believe long enough to start to defend it,...
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