by Lee Fried, on 16 Sep 2007 10:44 am
The Journey
Quote of the Week
Tomorrow is a big day and I am really excited. For many years the organization has been wrestling with defining a strategic planning and deployment process that would bring focus, alignment and engagement. Our current process is hierarchical, budget driven, removed from the gemba, heavy on planning, light on deployment and lacking the reinforced learning of PDCA discipline. In other words, it is very similar to the planning system that you would find at 99% of other organizations.
So why am I excited? I am excited because our leadership team realizes that our current system is not working and they are vested in finding a new way. Enter Pascal Dennis, author of Getting the Right Things Done,Lean Sensei and former leader at Toyota Ontario who is flying into Seattle tomorrow to help to develop a plan to change the plan. Pascal is an expert at Hoshin kanri, the Toyota system for planning and deployment also known as strategy deployment.
Over the next few years the organization faces many great challenges as it looks to reshape its management systems. My hope is that Hoshin will be a big driver in helping break down silos, gaining organizational alignment and focus and most importantly shifting the role of leadership/management from boss to teacher. From a personnel perspective I will have another great opportunity to continue my learning process with great teachers.
For this week’s quote of the week I have taken a paragraph out of Pascal’s book Getting the Right Things Done:
“Action without theory is aimless; theory without action is lifeless. Effective leaders move fluidly up and down a ladder of abstraction, between lower-level facts and higher level concepts. If you speak at high levels of abstraction without having reasoned your way to them from lower levels, what you say is unlikely to be founded in fact. Similarly, if you’re mired in lower-level data unable to extract the meaning, what you say is unlikely to motivate team members.”