DailyKaizen

Hi Everyone,

We received the following question from a reader.  I thought I would open it up to everyone before I gave my two cents:

We are getting educated about Lean and wonder if you have advice about selecting Consultants (or Senseis) to help us get move ahead effectively and avoid pitfalls?

Any input from others?

About a week ago I picked up on a recommendation a copy of the book Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.  The book follows the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s and his incredible ability to win year after year with a ball club that spends fractions less then other big league baseball teams.  Beane’s secret has been to break away from “traditional” baseball practice and thinking, which was heavily focused on finding individual superstars that could dominate opponents.  Beane, working for an organization with very limited resources knew that he could never compete with this type of strategy against the bigger named clubs.  Instead, he focused on the statistics and finding the less known and less expensive players that do small things right all the time.

For those of you that have not read this book I highly recommend it, it took me less then a week to finish and it made me think a lot, not about baseball, but about Lean and what I am working on in my own organization.   It was easy to take Beane’s methods and thinking and translate them from how he thinks about players to how organization’s think about opportunities.  Over the last couple of years working in many different organization I have been in countless forums where leaders dicussed finding the “home run” that if they could only just find it would lead to break through results.  Then off we go out to do significant amounts of analysis in search of this big win and we often end up frustrated, because we either can’t find it, or when we finally get it going it turns out to far less effective then we had thought (Mariners fans I am sure you can relate  :)   ).  This is a strategy that relies on a few people to come through with the big results.  Very unlean.

While I do believe that there are some “big hitters” out there for the organization I don’t think they will come easy or cheap (lots of resources and change management).  Maybe, like Beane we need to begin to think about how we find a set of decent hitters that consistently bring in returns without the big thrills, but also without the big organizational costs to get them?   If we take this approach it will take a lot more discipline, a lot more alignment and a lot more people engaged.  It will be less thrilling, with fewer big names, and a lot less resources.  Sounds a lot like Lean…