Encouraging signs on lean leadership

John Shook - Chairman and CEO Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc. (13.12.2012)

Exploring the world of "lean coaching" with over 200 of our closest friends last week at the Lean Coaching Summit in Orlando, there is no questioning the essential nature of coaching as a core skill of lean leadership. If lean is a matter of learning new skills and even mental models, learning lean is a "learn by doing" or experiential learning process. And if lean is an experiential learning process, coaching is THE skill to enable more effective, more efficient learning of lean thinking and practice. It's a skill that all lean leaders need to acquire – and that we'll explore further at our annual Lean Transformation Summit in March.

Lean leadership according to Art Byrne

Leading through lean thinking sometimes creates conflict. Consider even the way that leaders often feel forced to make a choice that seems essential at the time. Take time to develop people or push product out the door? Take time to develop people or develop people to take time? Stop to do root cause analysis or patch the leak and keep on sailing? Even when such trade-offs don't present themselves so explicitly, leaders are often stymied when they feel the need to narrow their focus and give up one aspect of lean practice to make progress on another.

But, in fact, lean practice is not about this question of "but" – lean is about the "and." Frontiers AND fundamentals, for example. Tools and management. Technical and social. Yoked together at the workplace. Fortunately there are some encouraging trends regarding the way people are talking about lean as a complete business system. A new book, The Lean Turnaround, by veteran CEO and lean legend Art Byrne, sheds light on leading lean as an integrative role. By sharing how he has lead the introduction of lean practice in more than 30 companies (including the famed tale of transforming Wiremold), Art shares his view of how lean operates as a complete business system—a comprehensive way of leading (and managing).

From doing lean to being lean – it's a system

Art's book is timely for its emphasis on the way lean operates as a complete business system. Once you start (andwhere you start, and with which tool you start, depends on where you are and what your problem is), then you find that everything must change—become lean—for any work to take root and generate further gains. Reducing inventory and boosting flow will force your sales force to rethink its opportunities and incentives; and will cause your accounting system to throw out standard assumptions about what to value. As Art says, "Lean cannot be just one of 10 elements of your strategy. It must be the foundational core of everything you are trying to do; that is how it becomes your culture. Don't just do Lean; be Lean." Embody lean thinking to solve business problems and make things better for your customers.

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