Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
July 11, 2007
From Lean Tools to Lean Management

From lean tools to lean management by Jim Womack:

The attraction of tools is that they can be employed at many points within an organization, often by staff improvement teams or external consultants. Even better, they can be applied in isolation without tackling the difficult task of changing the organization and the fundamental approach to management. I often say that managers will try anything easy that doesn’t work before they will try anything hard that does, and this may be a fair summary of what happened in the Tool Age

Teach all managers to ask questions about their value streams (rather than giving answers and orders from higher levels). Turn these questions into experiments using Plan-Do-Check-Act.

Only management by science through constant experimentation to answer questions can produce sustainable improvements in value streams. ( Toyota’s A3 is a wonderful management tool for putting science to work.)

He is right. The tools are useful. The much more significant changes are in the management suite not on the shop floor (or cubicle farm). Even on the shop floor there is room for huge amounts of improvement. In the c-suite I don’t know how to explain the amount of work left to do. Lets say this - there is much much much more improvement left to do than has been done so far.

Related: articles by Jim Womack - Deming on Management

Leave a Reply



Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2008 powered by WordPress

Internal Links

Author

John Hunter

Tags


Full tag could

Other

Search Blog

Web Search

Management Improvement web search

Recent Comments

  • Alan: If data alone were sufficient, then our financial markets would not be crashing right now. If you don’t...
  • Tom: I have been asking myself this same question for several years. I am of the opinion that the data deluge will...
  • shaun sayers: Getting the customer interface right is a major challenge. Many companies just have no perception of...
  • Matt Barney: Dr. Deming intuitively understood many aspects of improvement and human behavior - I also found it hard...
  • Bob Parsons: I like your article.. Way too many inefficiencies in today’s job market.
  • Clint: I like the idea, but I’d like to know what kind of responsibility the entrepreneurs have in repaying the...
  • Peg: So true about Ritz-Carlton. The most demanding customers in the world return again and again to Ritz-Carlton and...
  • Rob: I think the sentence, “Insisting on managing by the numbers even when the most important figures are...

Archives

July 2007
M T W T F S S
« Jun   Aug »
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031