Why Lean Sucks.

I am an experienced 'Lean' practitioner that has come to the conclusion that 'Lean' sucks. Please excuse the harsh language, but I feel quite passionate about the subject.

Imagine this situation: You approach an expert to help you lose weight and he promptly advises you to buy his book on the subject, the 'Perfect Pushup', a Bowflex, a yoga ball, a set of weights and a treadmill. He then declares that you are nearly there (and charges you a hefty fee...).

What's wrong here? Everybody knows that the best way to lose weight is through hard work and not fancy tools. You can eat well and exercise without all the tools and get to the end product. A Bowflex or a book on Healthy Eating can be a great assistance if used correctly, but is not the end product. The end product is losing weight.

Toyota is the model for 'Lean' and they have been very successful in the last 40 years. The reason for their success lies in their having a solid strategy that focuses on their customer and giving them a quality product, their discipline and excellent first line supervision, their utter dedication to solving problems, creating robust systems and continuously improving each step of their processes. Their success is not due to the few tools they developed to solve problems in their specific system.

Yet this is what you see during any 'Lean' transformation. Start with Value Stream Mapping (which I believe was a tool that had little to do with mapping 'value' and is not all that often used at Toyota), then go onto 5S (which most people miss the point of creating accountability and cascading authority and jump straight to cleaning up), then into week long Kaizens, etc, etc.

I read an article last week on how to know if your company was lean and not one of the metrics listed had anything remotely associated with making a profit. "What percentage of your Value Streams are mapped?" So having a map on the wall makes me Lean? Forgive me, but I'd rather have a dollar in my pocket.

In future posts, I am hoping to pull out some advice and ideas from great minds that show up over and over in the various books by great leaders of industry such as Jack Welch and leaders in Healthcare such as Quint Studer, books on Lean and Six Sigma, research explained in books such as Good to Great and First, Break All the Rules, and hundreds of other sources.

The purpose of this is to show that there are fundamentals to success in any organization that tend to get glossed over during a 'Lean' transformation. If you want a head-start you can visit my website at www.focus-north.com. It's in the process of being updated, but has some information already on it. Hope to see you again soon and please leave any thoughts or examples. I'll gladly incorporate them into the book form of Why Lean Sucks and we can both be famous.