by Lee Fried, on 04 Nov 2007 02:47 pm
The Journey
Quote(s) of the Week
This last Thursday I was stuck in Seattle traffic on my way home after a very long day from work and I was reflecting on our challenges to integrate PDCA thinking into all 10,000 of the employees I work with. During the day I had met with several teams that are focused on breaking out of their current “aim from the hip” culture and looking to move toward one more based on discipline and scientific method. But it is hard pushing, old habits die hard and many of these teams are feeling exhausted by their attempts to change. Each time something goes wrong it is human nature to fall back on what you know.
In the background I was half listening to an interview on NPR with a young man named Chris Sharma who just had a movie made about his rock climbing abilities. It suddenly dawned on my that the young man on the radio, who was sharing is philosophy on rock climbing was talking to my thoughts. In the interview, Chris shares the importance of process thinking, setting standards, and rapid cycles of testing and improvement. All of the points he makes in the interview are applicable to the challenges we face in trying to reshape our culture. There is no doubt in my mind that Chris Sharma is a Lean Thinker. When I got home I went online and listened several times to the interview several times and would recommend it to everyone. Here is a couple of quotes on rock climbing that stuck with me: (Taken off the radio so might not be 100% accurate)
“The hardest thing is to do something for the first time. Someone has to have the vision (to say), ‘oh, that’s possible.’ And once its done, others can see ‘oh yeah, it is possible.’ And it becomes easier for others to do it as well.”
“There are a lot of people that may be way to focused too much on getting to the top. They just want to get to the top, and have the success, which is to bad, because so much of it takes place in the process of working on it. That is the whole life of it.”
“Climbing is evolution. Where the standards today are the combination of all the efforts of all of us who are climbing right now and all the people before us.”