The business world seems fascinated with the story of how Toyota “invented” lean manufacturing. In actuality, Toyota did not aim to create this heavily marketed tool kit that we call lean manufacturing; the company simply did things “The Toyota Way” as they put it. Unleashing the innovative minds of people at all levels of the organization is the underlying philosophy at the heart of The Toyota Way and should be a part of every business.
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This philosophy is not restricted to cost reduction, as many popular examples of it would have us believe. In fact, the truest of Toyota Production System practitioners seem to focus on applying a systematic methodology for problem solving and interventions that are not limited to the topic of cost reduction at all. Focusing only on the cost-reduction aspects of lean is amateurish and can be a dangerous mistake for companies whose circumstances require attention on the revenue-generating side of the business. This is articulated further in a recent article I wrote for Quality Digest, “Facing Reality: The Misuse of Lean Principles.” Reducing costs to remedy a revenue-generation problem only slows the downward spiral but does nothing to address the origin of the business’s underperformance.
No matter how anybody spins it, the purpose of most business tools or fads is simply to enable improvement. Organizations should feel obligated to have a systematic management process in place. If you can’t manage management, how can you expect to manage anything else? The management process must revolve around a single collective understanding of the business system as a whole. Definition of ownership and how performance is measured in each process should be explicit and documented. With this infrastructure in place, management team meetings should aim to identify underperforming or constraining parts of the business system and uncover the point of cause within the system.
It is managers’ responsibility to orchestrate interventions in these target areas that improve performance by generating contribution from front-line staff. If the underperformance being addressed by an intervention warrants the application of popular lean cost-reduction tools, this is where they should properly be applied. Remember that any tool is subservient to the concept of performance improvement. Managers should simply aim to improve performance in their business systems.
There is no reason to be limited to any fad or tool kit. If problem solvers at Toyota had limited themselves to mimicking the solutions they witnessed in other businesses, they would not have innovated the solutions they have become so famous for today. Each business faces its own problems, and so each business should innovate its own appropriate solutions. That is the message we should take from Toyota, not a tool kit.
It is up to leaders and managers to enable the innovative minds of people in their organizations. Rather than exercising popular lean tools out of context, improve your business by practicing the true underlying philosophy that exists at the heart of lean, which is to lead your people to becoming contributing innovators.
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