by Lee Fried, on 17 Jun 2007 08:59 am
The Journey
Quote of the Week
Last week I read Jon Miller’s Lean book reviews and decided I needed to re-read Jamie Flinchbaugh’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean. For those of you that have not read this book I would highly recommend it. It is very easy to read, practical and gives an excellent perspective on how Lean can be adopted successfully. I read this books several months ago and found it valuable, but on a second read now that I have a couple of months more experience I found the book even more valuable.
This morning I was reading through a section that provides the “Five Leadership Moves for Lean” and all five I found to be accurate and timely for the work I am doing. Lean is all about leadership and your lean efforts will live and die by the effectiveness of your leaders. I am not going to tell you what all five moves are, you need to get the book for that, but I will share with you Jamie’s thinking on “Leadership Move Three: Eliminate Fear and Comfort”:
“For people to learn, they must step outside the bounds of what they currently know. They must change the conditions and rules under which they operate. This does not mean chaos and unorganized change. Stepping out of the comfort zone should be purposeful, continuous and mulit-dimensional. The leader must force people out of the comfort zone by setting clear goals and providing mechanisms. It is not simply about setting higher targets. It is requiring individuals and organizations to experiment purpose-fully. A leader should not reward those who hit the number by merely repeating everything they did the year before…If a leader asks a worker every day about the experiments he or she has performed toward improvement, the worker will eventually have to conduct some experiments to answer the questions.”
on 17 Jun 2007 at 9:38 pm 1.Rob said …
Lean and any other change program in a company depends on leadership. I hear of bottom-up implementation efforts, which almost always fail. I’ve also seen companies with poor senior management - the fish rots from the head, so to speak. Wikipedia does a great job summing-up the difference between merely managing and leading:
* Managers administer, leaders innovate
* Managers ask how and when, leaders ask what and why
* Managers focus on systems, leaders focus on people
* Managers do things right, leaders do the right things
* Managers maintain, leaders develop
* Managers rely on control, leaders inspire trust
* Managers have a short-term perspective, leaders have a longer-term perspective
* Managers accept the status-quo, leaders challenge the status-quo
* Managers have an eye on the bottom line, leaders have an eye on the horizon
* Managers imitate, leaders originate
* Managers emulate the classic good soldier, leaders are their own person
* Managers copy, leaders show originality
Rob
on 18 Jun 2007 at 9:38 am 2.Lee Fried said …
Hi Rob,
Thanks for sharing, I agree with all of these. It will be interesting to see if other readers of the blog share what they find to be the differences.
Take Care,
Lee