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Volume 11 Issue 4 | April 2010 | www.superfactory.com |
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From the Editor
- 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 Raymond Floyd Liquid industries, including reactive chemical factories, petroleum and metal refining, food and bio-pharma production are ones that could make great use of the concepts of Lean. However, Lean manufacturing is not widely used in these industries, largely because they are naturally conservative and thanks to the times, more financially stable than most, so great case stories of successful Lean implementation are rare. This book will be the first to offer details and examples of adapting Lean manufacturing to liquid industries. |
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Featured Article
By Michael Ballé, Excellence Systems Group When was the last time you remember thinking “I was wrong about this”? Yesterday? Last week? Never? Let’s conduct a short thought experiment: force yourself to think of an instance, any instance, where you were clearly wrong. How does it feel? Are you already lining up the mitigating circumstances (anyone would have done the same in this situation / that’s who I am)? Or the upsides (in the end, it’s a good thing that I was wrong because I’ve learned / cleared the air/ made things move, etc.)? If you are, don’t worry: this is perfectly normal and a sign of sanity. Only the clinically depressed are truly honest about themselves. Our brain does many very useful things for us and, among the many services it provides, it works full time at protecting our egos. We don’t make mistakes. When we do, we didn’t really (“mistakes were made” as politicians are wont to phrase it). And in, any case, these so-called mistakes were, in fact both unavoidable and lead to some silver lining. This hard-wired response expresses itself in how our internal dialogue frames awkward situations and, by and large, it pulls us through the day. Indeed there is evidence that people with the fewer doubts are overall happier (though not necessarily their close associates). It has only one drawback – it slows learning and discovery. True learning, learning about how to master a task or a situation one previously did not know, is hard. Learning is fun when it’s about finding out new information that enriches, supports or extends things we are already convinced of. But exploring a new domain is hard, damn hard, because at first, we do it wrong – we fail. Practice makes perfect, and it’s only by sticking at the task long enough that we eventually forge the right mental models which will allow us to perform it well. As a child, and a teenager, teachers and parents are on your back full-time to make you learn. And, granted, the mind is more pliable and less filled with experienced-backed certitudes. But as a grown-up, nothing out there induces you to learn. A few genuinely enjoy the “aha!” kick and seek new challenges for the fun of it, but most people will abandon any new task after the first efforts when it doesn’t pay back immediately. At work, the higher up the food chain you find yourself, the more validated you are – so the less inducements to learning you’ll face. |
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Featured Evolving Excellence Blog Post
The Single Greatest Obstacle to Manufacturing Excellence Some guy named Rich Campanola was working hard at the Simmons Mattress plant in Agawam, Massachusetts - trying to wrap his mind and the factory around lean principles - way back in 2002. Little did he know that lean was a complete waste of his time. Not 80 miles away in Cambridge, Harvard was cranking out smart kids with one purpose in mind - to find dumb working stiffs like Rich and profit from his efforts without ever raising a drop of their own sweat. There is no money to be made leading lean journeys - no serious money, anyway. The big money is in finding naive saps like Rich willing to do the hard work, buying his company, borrowing against the assets of the company to the hilt to pay yourself back the money it took to buy it plus a whopping profit, then unloading it on another investment banker to do the same. Simmons just came out of bankruptcy after having been bought and sold seven times in some twenty three years. It was a solid company when all of this began - still might be but it is unlikely we will ever know. By the time the last investment banker was finished with it, Simmon's debt had gone from $164 million to $1.3 billion, with the investment bankers sucking $750 million in profits on their 'investments'. Read the rest and comment... (13 comments so far) |
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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!
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