Last week, the topic of whether Japanese culture is the cause of the lack of lean success in the U.S. came up over at NWLean, and a lot of folks weighed in with their opinions on the subject.  I am more of an NWLean reader than contributor.  I learn a lot from reading what so many lean manufacturing folks have to say about so many topics.  But I chose to weigh in on this one after sensing a few too many people getting too caught up in Japanese culture.

I wouldn’t have given it another thought, but today I received a very gracious email from Ross Robson, the Executive Director of the Shingo Prize.  He wrote,

Bill, I just read you NWLean editorial and it was excellent.  It was the
most insightful blog that I have read.  Every point was accurate and I
agree with all of it. 

Good luck and have a great lean week!

If Ross Robson thinks it’s good, it must have something to it.  While I take a shot at the Shingo Prize from time to time, there is no greater lean thinker, nor anyone more committed to lean than Ross Robson.  I am flattered by his comments, and thought it would be worthwhile to share the post that drew his praise.

Here it is, as written in NWLean …

This Friday, an epic global struggle between workers and management will begin.  It has nothing to do with labor unions or socialism – in fact Karl Marx was such an eggheaded geek he would never have understood the issue and probably would have sided with management.  It is the World Cup.  If you are an American, you could not possibly understand the issue, even though the highest World Cup attendance of all time was at the 1994 Cup in the U.S.  The closest thing in the U.S. is the NCAA basketball tournament – March Madness – and that pales in comparison.

I understand it only because I happened to be in the middle of World Cup insanity in 1998.  The fact that the games were being played over 5,000 miles away in France didn’t matter.  I was in Brazil so I was in the eye of the storm.  Shortly before each game in which Brazil played, business across the country began to wind down.  There were no written policies, there were no signs on store windows announcing shorter hours or when they would reopen.  It was just commonly understood that the only places open for business were the ones that sold ‘chop’ (That’s a handy word to know if you ever go there.  It means beer, and it’s pronounced chope) and had a TV.  There is no exaggeration in that – the entire country shut down as if on cue, started drinking beer, watching soccer and behaving like raving lunatics.

The difference between Brazil and the rest of the world when it comes to the World Cup is the convoluted management principles that gave us people as variable costs, Alfred Sloan, layoffs as an inevitable fact of life, and the biggest manufacturing corporations hauling high tech gear into the world’s backwaters by oxcart to find cheaper labor.  For example, authorities in the UK are warning the British business community that World Cup absenteeism could cost the country £4 billion in lost productivity. Companies are calling lawyers, beefing up attendance policies, and starting to keep a sharp eye on the slackers who just might call in sick to watch a game.

Let’s put this in perspective.  The GDP of the UK is a shade north of £1.1 trillion – yeah, with a "T".  These guys are worked up that almost 0.4% of the country’s wealth might be lost to their citizenry doing something they really want to do.  The UK is not alone.  These industrial panic attacks are taking place all over the world – except in Brazil, of course.  The only businesses in Brazil burning the midnight oil doing World Cup contingency planning are the beer distributors and TV repair guys. The World Cup to them is what Christmas is to Toys R’ Us. 

The employers aren’t entirely blameless, however.  A recent study showed that one Brit out six showed up for work drunk at least once in the last six months.  Having visited a pub or two in the UK myself, I can assure you that most of the other five are lying.  In Germany, where the games are being played, they have launched a national "Be Nice To Foreign Visitors" campaign.  They already know it is a lost cause, though.  Beer and belligerence are so ingrained in the national culture that they are spending a lot more on security than on the ‘Be Nice’ crusade.

There is probably no avoiding some small number of crappy. miserable employers who will always see their employees as thieves who steal from the company every payday.  Nor is there avoiding the small number of people without the mental agility to understand that the company’s customers are entitled to their best efforts.

In between, however, lie a vast number of manufacturing managers and employees, spread throughout Europe, Asia, Mexico and South America, with a golden opportunity to demonstrate mutual respect for each other, pride in their country and the ability to be flexible.  It seems to me to be a good acid test for ‘leanness’. 

To the employers, leave the lawyers out of it, put the schedules and attendance policies back on the shelf and leave them there until the games are over, and talk to your employees.  In short, prove that you can be creative, respectful and effective.  Any jerk can enforce rules and fire people.  True managers solve tough problems.

To the employees, be smart enough to now that the month of June is not a battle between you and your boss, nor is it your birthright to stay drunk and skip work.  Rather, it a balancing act between your personal interests and the needs of your company’s customers.  Your boss probably wants nothing more than to be on the stool next to you in the pub cheering for the same team and cursing at the officials.  Your customer, however, is more important than you or the boss, and you owe it to the customer to be sure that his interests are covered before you order that first pint.

The measure of world class is whether you can get to July 10 without missing a game, without increasing costs and without missing a customer delivery.  For many manufacturers that will take a level of trust and flexibility that only very lean companies demonstrate.

None of this applies to you folks in Czechoslovakia until after Monday, however.  You might as well just go work since you have no chance against the USA.

There is nothing special about a "learning organization", and, for my money, the folks out trying to forge a consulting and writing career on the strength of creating ‘Learning Organizations’ don’t know much about people or organizations.  Now if they could figure out a good way to create an ‘Unlearning Organization, they would be onto something.  Learning is easy and it comes naturally.  Unlearning is almost impossible, but it is the big problem with lean manufacturing.

How many millions of people do you suppose line up and pay good money to visit Epcot every year?, or wander through the entire Smithsonian complex?, or save up for years so they can see the Louvre or the Vatican?  As far as I can tell, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Food Network, the Home and Garden Channel, Public Broadcasting and the Travel Channel are all doing a thriving business – and they are almost entirely devoted to learning.  People are cruising the Internet, thumbing through two year old issues of Time Magazine in doctor’s offices and scheduling dinner around Jeopardy and Who Wants to be a Millionaire.  Europe is the same.  In Asia many people are so wound up in learning that you want to tell them to shut down their brains for a few minutes every now and then and have more fun.  Anybody surrounded by non-learning people must be working at a cemetery.

There is no trick at all to learning something new – as long as it is something extra – something to supplement what we already know.  The problem with learning comes when we have to replace something we already know with something new.  Unlearning that which we know and believe in order to replace it with something new is hard for all of us, and virtually impossible for many of us.

It seems to me that the widely accepted elements of lean are those that have been presented to manufacturing as ‘extras’.  They don’t necessarily replace any old manufacturing principles.  Instead they just add to them and sort of flesh them out.  Unfortunately, they don’t help much either.  Kaizen events, for example, and six sigma projects are pretty easy to sell to manufacturing.  They don’t require manufacturing to abandon anything, except for a few details that are the focus of the project.  For the most part, however, they do not need manufacturing to completely reorganize or to abandon any of their old management systems and tools.  They are just projects, and manufacturing has been launching improvement projects since the beginning of time.  These are just new tools for projects, and no one has to ‘unlearn’ much of anything.

Balanced Scorecards are a great example of this principle in action.  It is not too tough to convince management that they need some new measurements – some non-financial stuff to look at alongside their old cost numbers.  Lean Accounting, however, is another matter all together.  Lean Accounting  demands that the old accounting system be scrapped.  Management and the accountants have to forget about the old ways – unlearn them.  Management has to look at a whole new set of numbers, not just a few extra numbers.  That has proven to be a very hard sell indeed.

The same is true with MRP.  The fact that putting pull systems into MRP is putting a square peg into a round hole has been commonly known for a long time.  Articles explaining how to supplement MRP with spreadsheets to facilitate lean are widely written and widely read, and they do not stir up any controversy.  Going the next step, however, and writing an article suggesting that the shop floor control half of MRP be tossed out entirely and replaced with something new rouses passionate objections.  Supplementing MRP is one thing, forcing people to forget they ever knew about it and wrapping their minds around a new approach is something else, and another very hard concept to sell.

People are probably the best example.  It is not too tough to bring managers along the path of engaging and involving people more in the problem solving and idea generating aspacts of lean transformation.  When you have to cross the line and stop treating production folks as variable costs and start categorizing them as fixed, the journey slams to an abrupt halt.  Production workers have always been variable costs and everything most people know about planning and budgeting, cost measurement, and capacity management revolves around that principle.  The benefits of stable, perhaps even lifetime employment are not hard to sell, but tossing out a whole bucket of management principles is virtually impossible.

It takes a sound intellect and a fair degree of self confidence to abandon something you know and have believed in, and replace it with something new.  That is especially true if your faith in that something has served you well and your knowledge of the new thing is a little shaky.  The easy path is to keep all of your beliefs intact and only adopt the bits and pieces of the new idea that supplement those beliefs.  The same is true with the lean facilitators and experts.  Selling kaizen events, suggestion systems and philosophy lessons is much easier than selling lean accounting, organizational restructuring and skills based compensation plans.  Unfortunately for both buyers and sellers, however, the unlearning and relearning path to lean is the only path that gets worthwhile results.

It makes sense, though, that the path that is toughest for the individuals involved and the organization as a whole is the only one that generates the lean promises of radical cost, profit, delivery and quality improvements.  The one management principle that will never change is that the amount of return on any endeavor is directly correlated to the risk.  The organization that refuses to take the risk of ‘unlearning’ their old principles will never realize much of a return on their lean learning.