Kevin Meyer

Life and leadership at the nexus of lean and zen.

Deepening the Lessons of Crisis

by

I’m sure all of us are paying close attention to the evolving coronavirus (COVID-19) situation and thinking about how it has and will affect our families, organizations, and society.  It’s too soon to say whether this will be long-term disruptive crisis or eventually turn into “just” a more severe version of the flu.  In the meantime, fear of the unknown is driving decision-making – both good and bad.

I’ve seen my fair share of crises in my three decade career, which have made me more than a little conservative and perhaps a bit OCD about contingency planning.  Some were even coincidentally compounded, like when the sharp downturn in the telecom market in 2001 led me have to announce the closure of a major manufacturing facility… the day before 9/11.  I’ve tried to learn from those incidents, as I am from the current.  Lessons are being taught by the coronavirus outbreak, but it’s important to use them to analyze the broader perspective.  Some than I’m thinking about:

Don’t ignore simple solutions.  We can significantly protect ourselves and others by simply washing our hands correctly and by not touching our faces.  In what other situations do we have similarly simple solutions, often known but not reinforced by standard work and requirement, and instead choose to invest in expensive countermeasures?

Continue reading on the Gemba Academy blog…

Refining and Reinforcing Principles

by

Earlier this month Ron discussed his top ten lessons from the last decade and Jon what he believes is the most important word of the year (“daily”).  Although I have tried to divorce myself from the arbitrary boundaries of a calendar year, I still take some time in December and January, deliberate time, to reflect on the past and create plans and experiments for the future.

Over the last decade this process and activity has helped me identify some grounding principles that I try to live by, personally and professionally, which each year become more defined.  I then work on reinforcing the principles throughout the year.  The principles are simple: reduce friction, share, and grow.

Reduce Friction

I define “friction” as anything that keeps me from optimal effectiveness, so it takes many forms.  Some examples:

Continue reading on the Gemba Academy blog…

The Problem of Profit as a Purpose

by

profit vampire

Just yesterday the Harvard Business Review presented an article by a London Business School professor suggesting that companies don’t always need a purpose beyond profit. I had to take a walk on the beach to get my blood pressure back to normal.

He starts off by lamenting that his school tries to instill in its students the desire to improve the human condition, but fails.

At London Business School, we often try to explain the purpose of our existence by showing pictures of our students who are working on environmental issues in rural India or improving sanitation in a township in South Africa. We also always highlight the wonderful work of our Professor of Economics, Elias Papaioannou, on clearing landmines in Mozambique. However, the reality of things is that most of our students go to work in management consulting, tech, or investment banking — even hedge funds.

I would suggest this in itself is a fundamental failure to teach the value, and non-financial rewards, of a worthy purpose beyond simply making money.  He then launches into how he believes the pursuit of profit has helped our world.

Continue reading on the Gemba Academy blog…

Teaching Thinking

by

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.
– Shunryu Suzuki

A couple of recent Harvard Business Review articles have discussed how higher education isn’t preparing graduates for the workforce and how engineers need experience in nonlinear thinking. There’s an interesting relationship between the topics, and it also brought back fond memories of my own experience in engineering school over three decades (!) ago.

Chemical engineering provides an exceptional foundation for process thinking. Chemicals generally flow in continuous fashion via pipes through various reactors to create a finished product. Small batches and work-in-process inventory are rare as the stability of WIP intermediates can be low. I mastered the theory and knew the equations, and enjoyed the puzzle of how do you turn raw component A into finished product B.

I’ve always been a hands-on guy, and after three years of heavy duty theory and equations I felt a need to see it in action. I took a semester and a summer off and did a co-op at a Nestlé manufacturing and research facility in Connecticut. This turned out to be one of the favorite experiences of my life and set the stage for my career in manufacturing.

Continue reading on the Gemba Academy blog…

Looking Forward With Alfred Adler

by

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations. – Alfred Adler

I’m not really sure how it started, but one day a couple months ago I found myself diving down an internet rabbit hole in search of more information on a guy named Alfred Adler.  Adler was an Austrian psychotherapist in the early 1900s who, although a good friend of Sigmund Freud, developed a theory of individual psychology nearly the opposite of Freud’s.

Adler’s perspective can most simply be described as “look forward, not backward.”  Whereas Freud focused on how the past affects current decisions (etiological), Adler suggested focusing on how a current decision will affect the future (teleological).  Like every varietal of both legitimate and fad psychological theory, this spawned some self-help books.  Not usually my genre, but I came across a fascinating book with a unique presentation style, and spent a few days knocking it out.

The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga is sort of like Adler meets Stoicism.  The entire book is a Socratic dialogue between a student and a philosopher, which helps make it an enjoyable read for the non-psychologist.  It doesn’t veer off the deep end too often, and simply tries to help you reframe your perspective to focus on a future driven by goals that then guide current day decisions.

Now the reason I will sometimes venture into individual psychology is because there’s often an analogue to organizational psychology or even basic organizational leadership.  This book slides right into that, and I immediately thought of several relevant parallels.

Consider the craziness of budgeting that most organizations unfortunately endure.  Sometime around September or October the process will begin, looking backwards at financial history then imposing some arbitrary mandate like “keep spending flat while increasing sales 25%.”  That preliminary budget will go up the chain, get bloodied up to further veer from any potential reality, and after lots of anguish and gnawing of teeth, will be set in stone retroactively around February or March.

At which time it’s already outdated and the underlying assumptions, if there were any meaningful ones to begin with, have probably diverged from current business reality.  Therefore it’s obviously time to start spending countless hours on variance analysis, coming up with explanations for missing budget, and presentations to executives on what will be done to fix it.  To top it off, the entire process is based on an arbitrary calendar year, which is usually completely unrelated to desired business activities which are often unrelated to creating customer value.

A decade ago I was president of a mid-sized medical device company.  We were well into our lean journey, and I was starting to think about lean accounting.  I dragged our CFO to one of the first Lean Accounting Summits, where there were several presentations on the craziness of budgeting, the silliness of arbitrary calendar year timeframes, and the incredible waste created by the budgeting and then variance analysis process.

At the end our CFO looked at me, nodded, and the day we got back we told the entire company that we were going to stop budgeting.  Effective immediately.  As a private company, we could do that.  We stopped, and after some initial panic the accounting department found they could now spend a lot more time helping the operations group analyze and thereby improve costs, and the other departments could focus on improvement.

We stopped looking backwards and using the past to guide our decisions.  Instead we set goals for the future and made financial decisions with that in mind.  Those goals were tied to hoshin plans, and reviewed quarterly.  Although we still reported financials monthly with a calendar year summary, projects and goals, and the associated funding, were not tied to the calendar year.

(Side note: one interesting downside we observed after a couple years was that the old traditional budgeting process had provided a lot of informal Finance 101 training for the non-accounting folks.  Without budgeting we ended up having to find other ways to provide that exposure.)

Yes, understanding the past can be important for context.  But just as with a balanced individual life you should put the past behind you and focus on the future, spend most of your organization’s time looking forward, focused on goals that are tied to principles, strategies, and creating customer value.

When Noise Masks the Problem

by

Shoulder Calcific Tendonitis

Last week I was reading Mark Graban’s latest book, Measures of Success, which does a great job of discussing how to use data to effectively lead and manage an organization.  With new technologies it has become so easy to capture data that we often go overboard – and really never understand why we are grabbing data and what it actually means.

One concept in the book is learning to discern true signals from noise, and then doing something about them.  This made me ponder when signals might be lost (or improperly conjured?) among noise in qualitative situations.  Actually, a more correct analogy is the classic lean concept of draining water – waste – to expose rocks – problems. It hit me that I had just experienced such a situation with a medical condition I hope I’m recovering from when you read this.

The day before this post is scheduled, I’m having surgery for a painful shoulder condition – calcific tendonitis.  As a result of an injury to a tendon, the body sometimes screws up and starts replacing tendon tissue with calcium.  Usually it soon realizes the mistake and reabsorbs the calcium and replaces it with tissue, but in some situations, like mine, it doesn’t.  So I now have a 2 centimeter hard calcium spike shredding my right supraspinatis tendon.  Through the wonders of arthroscopic surgery the calcium will be removed and the tendon repaired.  It’s not a fun recovery – four weeks in a sling and sleeping upright followed by three months of physical therapy – but it has a very high rate of success. [Update: surgery went well, but he also found and repaired a bone spur and torn rotator cuff.]

I began noticing the problem a few years ago after I injured my shoulder yanking a bag out of the overhead compartment of a plane.  Work outs, particularly movements that put pressure or strain on the shoulder (pull ups, push ups, burpees, sled push, even a downward dog!) have become increasingly painful.  However until recently it has been easy to modify and still get a decent work out so I just chalked it up to aging and moved on.  During regular daily activities I usually don’t notice any pain, and I’ve always been able to sleep well.

Those daily activities covered the real problem, which I realized when I did the silent retreat I told you about last June.  Surrounded by silence and tranquility, I soon realized I was really, and unexpectedly, in constant pain.  I also realized that I was modifying my normal activities to compensate far more than I realized, from eating to how I hold a book while reading, to even how I grip the steering wheel in a car.

That was the signal that something needed to be done.  An MRI and visit to the doctor confirmed the diagnosis and that the problem was only going to get worse.  Surgery was recommended.

Where else may you be experiencing a qualitative problem that is being hidden?  Is the overall great outward performance of a team member masking an underlying issue where she or he is actually unhappy or has untapped potential?  Perhaps that overgrown section of garden is hiding the gopher hole of a varmint that is silently destroying your yard?  Does your team need to go offsite for a day, without cell phones and email, to properly focus on and discuss issues?

The analogy is admittedly not perfect, but the point is that sometimes problems, and their scope, do not become apparent until extraneous information is removed.  If you see a potential issue, isolate it and focus on it, and see if it is something larger.  Then do something meaningful to correct it.

Latest Tweets

Archives

Recent Posts

Subscribe by Email