Comments on: Tools are just tools

By: Randy Fisher

Randy Fisher — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:08:06 +0000

I respect your admission that you were ‘very green’. My question then, is if you are so green, then how were you able to convince / persuade senior management to invest in this current course of action?

- Randy

By: Mark Graban

Mark Graban — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:47:00 +0000

Don’t let anyone forget the good Dr. Ted’s quote from my podcast with you guys –

“What tool do we use? Our BRAINS!”

I love that quote and can’t get enough of it.

Podcast Link

By: Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Improvement Tools and Improving Management

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:50:29 +0000

[...] Tools are just tools by Lee Fried We have begun to shift away from a tool driven approach to one more centered on improving our management systems. This makes the work far more difficult, yet far more rewarding. [...]

By: Lee Fried

Lee Fried — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 02:21:18 +0000

Hi John,

Thanks for the post and I could not agree more. Learning Lean does not happen in the classroom, it happens in the Gemba. We have been very focused on teaching from within the work and have begun to see a very strong correlation between the success of an improvement and then number of times a leader has participated/lead a kaizen effort. The hard part for us right now is that most of us are very green and the lack of experience often makes the going very slow.

Thanks for your input,

Lee

By: John Hunter

John Hunter — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 02:11:06 +0000

Great post. Great goal. I agree quite a challenge. I don’t think you can really hope to get all 10,000 to understand in the short run. My personal belief is the time of when you are trying to make this change (which takes years) to become an organization that acts as a system you balance education (investment - one of the best forms of investment often) and improvements today.

Often the two go hand in hand - there is little more educational than actually applying tools and concepts yourself to solve your own problems. That is the best way to educate. But I think when you see this dual role of current improvement efforts it changes your measure of success - not just measuring improvement for today (or improvements in the value stream that will pay dividends for years) but also valuing the new knowledge gained by the participants. I have never been able to quantify that second gain but that doesn’t bother me.