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Becoming Horizontal in a Vertical World

Value-stream leaders must change people’s flat-line thinking

Chet Marchwinski
Wed, 07/14/2010 - 06:00
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One of my favorite value-stream walks is with the senior managers of several organizations who share and jointly manage a value-creating process that stretches all the way from raw materials to the end customer. I’ve been taking walks of this sort for more than 20 years and I usually see the same thing: smart, hard-working managers, each trying to optimize their portion of the value stream and wondering why there is so much inventory, interruption, and waste along the stream, and why it is so hard to truly satisfy the customer waiting at the end.

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This is what I usually see, because we live in a world where everything is oriented vertically: departments, functions, enterprises, and—most important—individuals, despite the fact that the flow of value to the customer is horizontal across all the departments, functions, and enterprises. And—here’s the really odd part—every manager and employee touching the value stream knows intuitively, just below the surface, that value flows horizontally and that customers have no interest in the vertical constraints interrupting the flow.

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Submitted by mfmatusky on Wed, 07/14/2010 - 20:11

Horizontal in a Vertical World

This column reminded me of time spent engineering for the auto makers in Detroit. Whether in the plant or in the office there were people who kept strict boundaries around "their work" and there were people who made a point of knowing how to do 10% to 20% of the job being done on either side of them. The value streams with that 10% to 20% overlap were much more robust and the cost of the redundant knowledge was far less than the cost of the "fumbles" that took place at the strict boundaries.

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