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The Superfactory Newsletter is published monthly to over 50,000 subscribers. Inside Superfactory About -
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Volume 11 Issue 2 | February 2010 | www.superfactory.com |
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From the Editor
Last month Superfactory added a series of PowerPoint presentations on Lean Leadership. This month we're pleased to announce another new series of training presentations called the Lean Industries Series, with individual presentations on lean construction, lean government, lean financial services, lean healthcare, and many more. More information.
- Kevin Meyer |
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Manufacturing Excellence NewsStories of interest to the lean community.
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In the Evolving Excellence BlogJoin over 5,000 readers who get their daily dose of blunt manufacturing and business reality by subscribing to the Evolving Excellence blog!
Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:
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Upcoming Events
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Featured Book
By Shigeo Shingo Fundamental Principles of Lean Manufacturing is the latest discovered and newly translated book from Dr. Shigeo Shingo, the engineering genius and driving force behind the successful realization of the Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing. This first-time-in-translation book will give modern readers total access to the fundamentals of improving any process. Dr. Shingo directs the reader towards the path of flow operations, the ultimate and attainable goal of process improvement. His method of providing numerous examples with easy to understand, yet in-depth explanations of problem solving, is well represented throughout this book. |
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Featured Article
By Jamie Flinchbaugh, The Lean Learning Center Managers get tons of training on how to solve problems. They get no training on their role in problem solving. Their role isn't just about solving problems. But here is the neat trick. It is solving problems that probably got them the promotion into management in the first place. This happens continually in the management chain. What leads to success in one role is often different in another role. We cannot take a super worker and make them a supervisor, without changing their role and their skills. So what happens to managers when they get promoted? How do they start to engage in the problems of the organization? Many experience what I call The 25 Problems Problem. If you have five direct reports and each of them has five problems they are working on, how many problems do you have? If you didn't think I was setting you up, most would answer 25 problems. But that's the wrong answer. Your team has 25 problems. But those are NOT your problems. Those are your team’s problems. If you see them as your problems, you will do all the wrong things. Here's what it probably looks like. The team has 25 problems. You cannot solve all of them, so you decide which of the 25 are the biggest. Then you focus your attention on those, along with the people that are already dealing with them. And that feels good, because they are getting extra attention. But let's take that to the extreme. Imagine the CEO leads an organization with 1,000 people who each has five problems. Does she have 5,000 problems and just has to decide which 10 to deal with? I say 10 because obviously a CEO can handle more problems than the average person, or so we like to think (note intended sarcasm in case you didn't pick up on it). If she only looks at those 5,000 problems and picks which ones to work on, many of the right things won't happen in the organization. |
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Featured Evolving Excellence Blog Post
A New Critical Japanese Lean Term: oushikuso Perhaps the best thing that could happen to manufacturing improvement is the debacle that is unfolding at Toyota. It will put to rest so much of the nonsense and oushikuso that has pervaded lean manufacturing since day one - and it should help to drive the charlatans away. Not familiar with the term oushikuso? Copy it and paste it to this site in the box that says 'Japanese to English Dictionary' and click 'translate'. Got it? There is no such thing as 'Toyota DNA' and excellent manufacturing is not some Toyota zen philosophy that arose like the Phoenix from that ashes of Japan after World War II that cannot be understood - just taken on faith because it is some wildly successful, ethereal Toyota world view. To paraphrase Doc Holladay in Wyatt Earp, "There is no mysticism my friend. There is only what we do." Excellent manufacturing is a complicated, knotty set of fundamental management and factory economic principles and practices, all rooted in sound engineering and financial logic. It is not easy to understand, and even more difficult to translate and apply to any particular business becasue it is typically a radical departure from the engineering and financial principles by which the business operated in the past. Kudos to Toyota for contributing so much to the development of those principles and practices. But the 'Toyota Way' is not The Way for the Acme Manufacturing Company in Omaha, Brisbane, Munich, Shanghai or anywhere else. The Way for those companies - every company for that matter - is that company's own way based on the difficult application of the same core engineering and financial principles to their unique business circumstances. Seeking to imitate Toyota simply for the sake of imitating Toyota, and holding Toyota up as the infallible ruler of the manufacturing world from some factory high atop Mount Olympus is folly. |
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© 2010 Superfactory by Factory Strategies Group LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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Welcome to the Superfactory Newsletter and welcome to a new year! We are now beginning the 11th year of the newsletter!
We are running a promotion with our partner Gemba Academy where we'll send you the 
Fundamental Principles of Lean Manufacturing
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25 Problems