This is what $1 billion (and $25 million a year) gets you.

by Dan Markovitz

The New York subway system has invested nearly $1 billion investment since the early 1990s -- and $25 million per year in maintenance cost -- in equipping stations with elevators and escalators. The results have been less-than stellar.

According to a recent article in the New York Times,

One of every six elevators and escalators in the subway system was out of service for more than a month last year.

The 169 escalators in the subway averaged 68 breakdowns or repair calls each last year, with the worst machines logging more than double that number. And some of the least reliable escalators in the system are also some of the newest.

Two-thirds of the subway elevators — many of which travel all of 15 feet — had at least one breakdown last year in which passengers were trapped inside.

Now, keeping the NYC subway system running is in many ways a Herculean task. The system serves five million riders per day, and runs 24 hours a day. It's also incredibly far-flung, which slows maintenance responses to breakdowns. And there's all kinds of, um, ancillary abuse:

Elevators become makeshift bathrooms, and escalator steps are pounded by heavily loaded hand trucks.

Notwithstanding those challenges, however, New York City Transit has sown the seeds of its own difficulties by violating key lean principles. Take investment in people:

In private industry, many workers go through a rigorous four-year training and apprenticeship to become elevator and escalator mechanics.

At New York City Transit, newly hired mechanics, many of whom have no experience in the field, are given a four-week introductory course in elevator and escalator maintenance. They are then issued a bag of tools and sent to work, paired up initially with a more experienced mechanic.

There is no requirement for refresher training.

It's not just a private sector/public sector difference, either: the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority created its own training program that includes a four-year apprenticeship with 1300 hours of classroom training.

More significantly, the agency has a culture of trying to solve problems without trying to understand the root causes of the breakdowns.

In many cases, riders were trapped in elevators where a mechanical problem occurred again and again. Some times, mechanics may have lacked the ability to solve the problem. At other times, transit officials said, supervisors failed to see patterns of breakdowns or felt pressured to put the machines back into operation in a hurry even though they needed additional work.

In one particular case, an elevator had broken down five times in the eight days leading up to a serious (40 minute) breakdown. Each time, mechanics came, made minor adjustments and put the machine back in service — only to have it break down again. You'd think that an "Ohno Circle," or at the very least a "Five Whys"/root cause analysis, would have been not only useful, but ultimately more time efficient and cost-effective.

The transit agency is making important changes. Contractors are now supervised by experienced employees when they install equipment. And there's now a special group of mechanics to conduct tests at key stages of construction.

But there's still an attitude that the mechanics just "have to do better." After three out of six escalators were found with improperly installed bolts (which caused steps to literally fall out of the machine), Joseph Joyce, the transit agency’s general superintendent of elevators and escalators said that he was trying to

[foster] a culture of accountability among his mechanics and managers. “I’m trying to get these guys to think that, you know what, that could be your mom that’s walking with a cane and needs that escalator."

And after the drive chain on another escalator snapped, Joyce said

“They’re good mechanics, but they missed something that day. I think they had a bad day that day."

But as Mark has pointed out many times, this kind of thinking just doesn't work. For one thing, the implicit assumption is that the workers don't care enough to want to do a good job -- an assumption that flies in the face of lean thinking. More importantly, no matter how often doctors -- or mechanics -- are told to be careful, they're guaranteed to make mistakes if they don't have enough training, or sufficient authority to shut down a machine and conduct a root cause analyses, or proper standard work procedures to ensure they don't miss critical steps.

Human beings will always make mistakes. It's management's job to create a process that prevents those errors from occurring. The New York City Transit Authority is moving in the right direction, but at the top level they still need to change the way they think about the problems -- and their employees. At $25 million a year, the riders and taxpayers of New York deserve nothing less.

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Respect for People: US Army Edition

by Dan Markovitz

strategy+business, the e-magazine from Booz, Allen & Hamilton, reports how the US Army is changing the way that it shares knowledge within such a massive organization. The new system is a powerful example of how respect for people and a focus on correcting systems can lead to huge improvements.

The Army’s bureaucracy has been criticized over the years for impeding the transfer of essential knowledge quickly throughout the organization. To address that problem, the Army developed the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) network in 2006. This Web-based collaboration system allows new bottom-up concepts to be disseminated instantly to those who can benefit from them. In its first year of operation, the network shared more than 15,000 lessons from combat operations. Of these, more than 4,000 led directly to improvements in unit preparation and training for deployment.

The article explains how the deeply-rooted Army culture inhibited the adoption of CALL at first:

As you might imagine, some Army leaders were initially reluctant to allow CALL analysts to post information about their own snafus because they didn’t want such failures broadcast and didn’t want to be penalized for errors. But analysts worked around these ingrained anxieties by assuming that if team X is having a particular difficulty, it likely reflects a systemic problem. The analysts will check around the network to see if others are experiencing a similar challenge. And when they get confirmation, they post the problem on CALL in a generic fashion, specifically describing the issues, mistakes, and lessons learned without identifying who, what, when, or where.

And this is where we come to respect for people: the focus of CALL is not on identifying a person's mistakes or penalizing individuals for having problems. Rather, the assumption is that there's a "systemic problem" that needs to be addressed and fixed. In other words, there's no blame for doing something wrong.

Toyota, of course, approaches mistakes and defects on the production line in the same way. They're opportunities to learn, to solve problems, and to improve the system -- not excuses to fire or punish someone.

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Buying a bigger pair of pants will NOT solve your weight problem.

by Dan Markovitz

Whew! Just in case you panicked at the thought of not having access to email on your upcoming flight to Slippery Rock, JetBlue has come to the rescue with in-flight internet access. You'll never again have to endure five whole unconnected hours without riveting messages from the CEO informing you that his daughter's Girl Scout cookies are on sale in his office.

Presumably, JetBlue's new service will be welcomed as a godsend by road warriors who break out in hives at the terrifying prospect of a few hours in the air without email. These folks live with some sort of imagined corporate armageddon looming over them if they can't respond to an email instantaneously, or at least within 19 seconds. To these poor wretches, I can only say: get over it. Your firm will not collapse like a dying star, nor will your clients wither away for lack of your expert ministrations. And if you really are that vital, well, you probably shouldn't be getting on a plane (at least not a commercial plane) in the first place.

JetBlue's service will also surely be welcomed by those folks who figure with an extra four or five hours of solid time paddling around in Outlook, they can really make some progress on the 639 unread messages languishing in their inboxes, as well as the other 281 messages that have been read, but need a response. To these lost souls, I can only recycle my favorite expression these days: buying a bigger pair of pants will NOT solve your weight problem. If the electronic seams of your email waistband are groaning, an extra five hours or fifty hours won't make a difference.

The problem is the lack of a decent process for handling email, not a lack of time to handle it. It's classic non-lean thinking: throw more resources at the problem by buying newer, bigger machines. This approach invariably fails to produce the desired productivity gains because the underlying process is dysfunctional.

The same is true of adding an extra few hours to your day of reading and writing email. The extra time isn't going to help you get on top of your email. It will only compound the problem. The lean approach is to improve the underlying process by which you manage email.

I've written about how to reduce the volume of email you suffer with here and here, and Merlin Mann has an excellent series of posts on how to get to inbox zero here.

Rather than waste an additional five hours getting yourself even farther behind, I'd suggest using that time on the plane to learn the lean process of handling email and finally take care of the stuff that's moldering away in your inbox. And treat yourself to an extra bag of Oreos while you're at it.

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Maybe a little hansei would be in order.

by Dan Markovitz

Without realizing it, James B. Stewart, the SmartMoney columnist for the Wall Street Journal, touched on the value and power of hansei (reflection) in yesterday's piece (available for free here). Commenting on the recent ouster of Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal, he writes that

Mr. O'Neal and his board may have failed to engage in the kind of debate that would have prevented this tragedy [the $8.4 billion write-down of assets]. To be specific, what was Merrill's board asking O'Neal when Merrill was earning record profits on the outsize success of its huge investment in subprime mortgages and related collateralized debt and loan obligations?. . . I know it's hard to ask tough questions in the face of success. It's not a strategy for winning popularity contests. But it's essential in the worlds of business and investing.

We often think of hansei as something that's done after project completion to determine what went wrong. But in fact, hansei is just as valuable -- and perhaps even more so -- when things go well. Matt May addressed this very idea in a recent blog post about Toyota exceeding their global sales goal, and doing it three years early:

Hansei is not about confirmation. It's not about celebrating success. It's a sobering reality check, even when a project has been wildly successful. Were you to attend a hansei meeting following a resounding success at Toyota, you would be shocked at the tone of the meeting. It's stern and serious. Yes, the team greatly exceeded expectations, but exceeding expectations also means project members didn't fully understand the process, or else misjudged the impact of factors beyond their control. Their objectives should have been met. And even if they reached their exact target, the team must still examine their course of action and the interim measures, not just the final results.

Matt goes on to explain that

the fruit of all hansei is new policy and the road to new policy is lined with sharp questions.

These are precisely the questions that the Merrill board wasn't asking. They accepted the fantastic returns O'Neal delivered without questioning whether those returns could be generated without a commensurate increase in risk.

Stewart's column focuses on your responsibility as an individual investor to examine the top performing positions in your portfolio so that you can understand why you're doing so well -- and what risk you might be taking on. But his point is equally valid for your personal lean efforts at work: do you really understand why some of your efforts go smoothly?

Don't just congratulate yourself on your brilliance. Do some hansei and figure out why you succeeded. You're guaranteed to learn something important.

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Lean Transport: Buses vs. Light Rail

By Dan Markovitz

Mark posted yesterday about the relative leanness of light rail vs. buses. He pointed out that

a rail line probably has more capacity, but it's very much a fixed asset, a "monument" if you will. Buses are very flexible, both in terms of routes and incremental capacity, right? But, then again, buses do add to traffic congestion, so maybe there's no easy answer about which waste is worse.

But buses don't have to add to congestion as much as we believe. The January 2006 issue of the Sierra Club magazine featured an interview with Brazilian architect (and former mayor of Curitiba) Jaime Lerner about how to build a mass transit system that serves the needs of consumers without creating additional traffic. His questions, and his solution, demonstrate a keen eye for avoiding waste.

Lerner promotes a BRT ("bus rapid transit") system. Currently, more than 60 cities worldwide have some version of a BRT (including Seoul, with 10 million people, and Curitiba, with 1.7 million residents). A BRT requires only a few relatively simple modifications—dedicated lanes in the center of the street where transit vehicles run unimpeded, "boarding tubes" where passengers pay fares before their bus arrives, and curb-level entries so they board and exit quickly.

Lerner's team began with a clear customer focus: what do people value in a transit system:

We started by trying to understand what mass transit is and what it should be: fast, comfortable, reliable. Most of all, you shouldn't need to wait.

And in true lean fashion, they had to figure out how to do more with less:

We wanted to make sure we could run our system on surface streets because it's cheaper. We had no money and no loans. . . . When we started out, we thought our system could hold us until we could afford a subway. Now I'm sure we don't need a subway.

While Paris, London, Moscow, and New York have extensive subway systems, they were built at the beginning of the last century when it was significantly cheaper to work underground. BRT is also much cheaper than a light rail line. (Are you listening Seattle?)

Light rail is sometimes 10 to 20 times more expensive than a BRT, and it takes more time to implement. When you have time and money and are able to subsidize the system, light rail is OK. But when you have to subsidize every ticket, you're taking money from other social investments. That's the main issue. You can have a BRT system that's as good as an underground or light rail, and it pays for itself.

In true lean fashion, the city found (in Matt May's words) an "elegant solution" to their transportation issues. Lerner explains that

we had to have dedicated lanes. Not just separated by painted lines but physically separated and at the center of the street. And the system had to be fast. That means stops every five or six hundred meters [about a third of a mile], not every block. We transport 2 million people at one-minute intervals—and sometimes at 30-second intervals. Our BRT can carry the same number of passengers as a subway and is 100 times less expensive per kilometer.

The entire interview is fascinating and well worth reading. For my money, the best quote is Lerner's approach towards cars:

I'm not against cars. But your city doesn't have to be oriented toward them. A car is like your mother-in-law. You want to have a good relationship with her, but you can't let her conduct your life. When a city has good public transportation, it becomes for people and for cars. Imagine a city with 30 percent fewer cars on the streets.

30% fewer cars? Less traffic? Fast, cheap, mass transit? Public money freed up for other, more productive uses? Sounds lean to me.

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Booz Gets Lean (without knowing it)

by Dan Markovitz

The latest issue of Strategy+Business, Booz Allen Hamilton's business journal, features an article on cost cutting. Ordinarily, simple cost cutting flies in the face of real lean, but in this case, the authors' recommendations incorporate an important lean principle, rather than defaulting to "L.A.M.E."

The authors argue that cost-cutting through layoffs and budget cutting will ultimately fail unless the three strands of the "organization's DNA" -- information, decision rights, and motivators -- are also involved. This is welcome change from the standard approach to cost-reduction of layoffs, outsourcing, and assorted (and predictable) "belt-tightening" measures.

Briefly, "information" means distributing throughout the firm the necessary information about internal costs of shared services such as IT, manufacturing, or distribution:

Information is power, and with real transparency on the price of goods and services, the law of supply and demand can take hold. Companies can allocate services by forcing departments to make decisions on the basis of fixed prices for services or by open, competitive bidding between internal and external service providers.

Nothing particularly lean about this point. But it's certainly worth making, since all-too-often people have no idea of the internal economics of the organization.

"Decision rights" is the authors' fancy term for decision-making authority, and in this article, they raise an idea very much in keeping with lean: that this authority should be delegated to the people in the "gemba" (the Japanese term referring to the "actual place" where work is done), since not only do they have the best understanding of the processes involved, they can actually make the decisions more efficiently:

The happy medium requires senior managers to push decision rights further down the org chart while carefully monitoring the decisions their direct reports make. That expands the senior manager’s span of control and ensures a more efficient decision-making process based on local knowledge. And given good information, those decision makers become more efficient, lowering the cost of the decision-making process itself.

Finally, the authors argue that "motivators" -- incentives such as promotions and salary increases -- be used wisely. They contend that standard vertical promotions

accomplish little more than adding layers of management and creating a cadre of highly paid individual performers with little real managerial responsibility.

Instead, they propose the adoption of "lateral promotions,"

which confer more responsibility and higher salary without a move up the management ladder. Such moves serve not only to put the brakes on the build-up of excess management layers but also to open up the channels of communication, thanks to the increased movement of managers from department to department.

This idea, too, isn't explicitly mentioned in the Toyota Production System. But the concept of a lateral promotion and the resulting benefit of keeping overhead to a minimum is what Matt May would call an "elegant solution," and is very much in keeping with the spirit of lean.

So hats off to the authors: without even knowing it, they hit upon some key tenets of lean: respect for workers in the gemba by enabling them to make critical decisions, and avoiding unnecessary buildup of the turgid hierarchy that chokes so many organizations.

What About The Other Car Makers?

by Dan Markovitz

This blog has commented (here and here) on the WSJ's rush to predict the folly of just-in-time manufacturing in the wake of the earthquake last week that crippled Japanese auto production. ("Blame it on kanban, the just-in-time philosophy of keeping as little inventory on hand as possible.")

What's striking about the WSJ's maligning of just-in-time is that the earthquake forced the temporary shutdown of nearly 70% of Japan's auto production -- not just Toyota's. Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Suzuki, and Fuji Heavy Industries (Subaru) also had to stop or slow production last week.

So why attack just-in-time? Why not attack mass production, since it clearly didn't keep the other car companies running? Or the danger of single-source supply for critical parts? Or having factories in Japan, a notoriously earthquake-prone country, for that matter?

Fortunately, Toyota's president, Katsuaki Watanabe, doesn't pay too much attention to the shrill cries of the WSJ. He announced that

the company will examine its risk management and risk control and look for ways to become less dependent on single suppliers. He stressed the auto maker won't change its kanban, or just-in-time, strategy of keeping as little inventory as possible on hand, which reduces warehouse costs and ensures quality.

The solution to these once a decade disasters? Kaizen, of course.

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The Normalcy Of Waste

By Dan Markovitz

Last week the Wall Street Journal interviewed George David, the CEO of United Technologies. Though the conversation didn't address his views on lean, he decries all forms of waste:

You can’t walk through life with a trained eye and not see the opportunities for productivity. Every time you sit in traffic, that’s a productivity loss. Every time you go to the doctor and fill out a bunch of forms and he refers you to somebody else and you fill out the same forms all over again, that’s a loss of productivity. Whenever you wait for something, that’s waste. I believe you can have 10 times more. I really do. . . . Just look at the differences in personal productivity between people, educated versus not educated. Or people in good, really productive labor environments, versus people who are kind of struggling because they’re in disorganized or ineffective companies.

Tim Walker, in his "What I've Learned So Far" blog, has an interesting comment on the WSJ interview:

The truth is, an abundance of cheap energy over the past century, while enabling huge strides in technology, global travel, and trade, has also instilled an ethic of waste in many of us. It has become incredibly easy and cheap — relative to the prior course of human history — to make more things, to ship them quickly, and then to whisk away the leavings. It has been incredibly easy to leave the lights on, and to build in pockets of waste in our systems, simply out of habit, or for want of better forethought. It has become normal to waste.

Tim is not a lean evangelist, as far as I know. Nor, presumably, does he know about the origins of the Toyota Production System. But his comment points to Toyota's resource-poor origins. In the post-WWII era, the company couldn't afford to leave the lights on, much less stockpile inventory. (Even now, of course, the company still makes a habit of turning off the lights. Waste is waste, even if you're rich.) Financial constraints forced Toyota to unearth the pockets of waste in its production system.

Tim's notion of the "normalcy of waste" applies to our own individual work processes as well, and not just the systems in which we work. To poach Tim's phrasing, it's incredibly easy to store gigabytes of data, and as a result we don't discipline ourselves to apply 5S principles to the information we manage. It's incredibly easy to fill co-workers' email inboxes with low-value or no-value junk, so we don't focus our work-related communication on truly important issues - and as a result, we have to slog through dozens or hundreds of crap messages that suck up our time during the day. It's incredibly easy to take work home with us, so we don't develop an aversion to wasting time during the day. (Except right before our big vacation to Maui. Then we're totally focused on our work, and we eliminate all the waste that might keep us from catching the plane.)

In a recent post at Evolving Excellence, Kevin Meyer also touched on this idea, that having more -- more space, more machines, more capacity, etc. -- leads to inefficiency. Which brings us right back to Toyota in 1946, when the company didn't have more of anything.

We may be living in an age of abundance, but the one thing that remains scarce is time. No matter how much you try to improve your "time management," five minutes will not become six, and 24 hours will not become 25. So you have to use it as efficiently as possible. Each moment should be delivering value -- to the company, to your family, to your community, to yourself. Anything else is waste.

How are you going to make a lean life?

Clarifying Lean vs. Frugal

By Dan Markovitz

There's been some confusion over my recent post criticizing the Business Week article on Toyota's "frugality." I do not believe that Toyota is frugal (read: "cheap"). Rather, I believe that the company is simply focused on value.

The distinction I make is subtle, but I don't think it's trivial. Here's the way I look at it: frugality (or cheapness) makes cost-cutting the goal, rather than the means to the end -- which is to deliver the most value to the customer.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, if Toyota really wanted to cut indirect costs, they'd close down their dormitories instead of just turning off the lights. The dorms are not adding any value to you or me when we buy a car, except insofar as they help the company develop competent workers. And (in my mind, anyway) that's the road you'd take if you were just interested in cutting costs/being frugal.

Kirk Paluska, an instructor at the Lean Enterprise Institute, once pointed out that lean isn't a cost-savings strategy; it's a cost-avoidance strategy. That's a subtle distinction, too, but I think it gets to the heart of the difference between frugality and lean.

Avoiding costs is a strategy that places the customer and value front and center. Cutting costs puts the income statement front and center. And once you start doing that, you're on the road to layoffs, outsourcing, and all the other productivity-improving chimeras that so many companies chase.

Lean Is Not "Frugal." Lean Is "Value."

By Dan Markovitz

BusinessWeek online joined the rest of the media in noting that Toyota just passed GM as the global leader in auto sales this quarter. The article covers all the usual points, and to its credit, does add a few words about lean. But the author goes off-track when he states that,

Toyota workers value frugality—whether it's turning down the heat at company-owned dormitories during working hours back in Japan, or spending weeks jawboning with suppliers to figure out ways to redesign a key component and shave another 10% from production costs.

Clearly, the author is trying to address the issue of muda. But he misses the point: Toyota (and the employees) aren't trying to be "frugal." They're not trying to save money.

Rather, they're trying to eliminate the waste in their operations -- from the production line to the dorm rooms -- that the customer doesn't value. Hell, if Toyota really wanted to save money, they wouldn't have company dormitories at all. They'd let employees take care of their own housing.

From this perspective, "frugality" isn't the goal at all. Frugality is simply a by-product of the focus on customer value.

What Will You Do Differently Today?

By Dan Markovitz
Back in October, Lifehacker ran a lengthy article on "personal kaizen." The thrust of the piece is how we can improve our lives by adopting the kaizen approach of the TPS and applying it to our own work habits.

It's not worth nitpicking some of the author's misunderstanding of kaizen, and the confusion with other lean principles like error-proofing or eliminating waste. While he's certainly not ready to write a scholarly treatise on lean, he does touch on something very important: that kaizen can apply to every aspect of how we work, even the small, seemingly insignificant (or ancillary) aspects of our work habits.

There's a tendency to think of kaizen as a massive, stop-the-assembly-line "event" during which we make gigantic improvements in the company's operations. And certainly there's value to the kaizen blitz. But relying upon a "blitz" for improvement often means ignoring the value that the steady accretion of small changes can bring.

The author points out, for example, how he looked at his system for handling email and improved it so that he didn't lose urgent or critical emails:

You might introduce a folder flow. You're all email wizards by now, so this is just an example. You might have an inbox and an urgent box. You set up a filter so that all email marked urgent go into the urgent box, and all others sit in the inbox. You set aside five minutes every hour, right before you refill your coffee cup, to deal with the urgent items as quickly as possible-- you want that coffee, right? And twice, right before lunch and before you leave for the day, you clear out the inbox, reading and dealing with all items that weren't marked urgent. Easy and simple, with process improvements and thinking built in.

And here's another example of how he constantly fiddles with the way he stores information -- phone numbers, contact names, links to websites he finds valuable -- so as to improve his ability to find what he needs quickly:

A few months back, I started using GTDTiddlyWiki. It's packed with features, and I've found a number of them that I like very well-- really, it's just a canvas on which you can design your own process improvements and workflows. I store lots of data there. I back it up by sending it to my Gmail account. I'm continually tearing apart my system of hyperlinks and reconfiguring them in ways that make more sense, are simpler and easier. It took some time getting used to it, but that single, free HTML document ended up being my killer app, and I would miss it terribly. Now I use it every day, and using it is unconscious. I don't have to think about what I'm going to do with a phone number or a contact name. I don't need to wonder where I wrote that little idea. All that thinking is inbuilt.

All he was trying to do was make his life just a bit easier, and without realizing it, he hit on key elements of 5S, of waste, and of standard work.

Whether or not his system would work for you is irrelevant. What's important to note is his constant fiddling with his personal work system. He's attempting to make his job a little bit simpler, so that he can do his job a little bit more easily.

Have you examined how you work recently? Do you lose time looking for information -- or worse, actually lose the information itself? Do you start a task -- an email, a budget review, a press release -- and lose track of it behind six other windows on your computer -- and then, when you rediscover it, you realize that you forgot what you were going to write? Do you wake up at 2am remembering a phone call that you didn't make?

These are symptoms of problems that you can solve, with a little bit (okay, maybe a lot) of kaizen. Look at those annoyances and ask the Five Why's. Think about how you can improve your work habits to eliminate those problems. Just like problems on a production line, all these issues are simply opportunities to improve your work process and do your job better.

In a Fast Company article on Toyota, journalist Charles Fishman noted that a typical Toyota assembly line in the United States makes thousands of operational changes in the course of a single year. He adds,

that number is not just large, it's arresting, it's mind-boggling. How much have you changed your work routine in the past decade? Toyota's line employees change the way they work dozens of times a year.

And he's right, of course. Most of us handle memos, documents, phone calls, emails, meetings, interruptions -- all the forms in which information flows through us (and our office) -- the same way today as we did last month, last year, and three years ago. While we've been planning our upcoming kaizen blitz in the factory (or the hospital or the insurance office), we've forgotten to look at our own work habits to see what we could improve. And that's really the essence of kaizen.

Multitasking is NOT Part of Standard Work

By Dan Markovitz

The New York Times ran an article this weekend exposing the myth of multitasking. Despite the common belief that we have to multi-task to get our work done, and despite the presence of technology that encourages us to do more than one thing at a time, the reality is that we're undermining our own ability to do a good job when we try to do two things at once. (click photo for larger view)

René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, says

A core limitation [of the human brain] is an inability to concentrate on two things at once.

The brain's limitations are important when you consider the implementation of lean in your office. Office workers are essentially monument machines: multiple value streams flow through them, and as a result, they have to continually switch from task to task. When you multitask (and you're not really multitasking, of course; you're actually doing serial processing, with rapid switching between tasks), you're reducing your efficiency and quality.

The article quotes David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, who explains that

Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes. Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.

So, how does this tie into lean and the concept of standard work? Consider: the goal in creating standard work on a factory line is to improve quality by reducing variation. Standard work in an office environment has the same goal. And standard work for both operators on a production line and operators in an office requires doing one (and only one) thing at a time.

Therefore, multitasking is antithetical to the concept of standard work. Whether it's building a spreadsheet, doing a performance review, writing an email, or answering a colleague's question, people need to focus on one task to do it efficiently. That's the rule in the factory. Ignore the siren call of multitasking, and make that the rule in the office, too.

(Read more of my comments on multitasking here and here.)

Newsflash! Respecting workers = better results!

By Dan Markovitz

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ran an article explaining that employees are more likely to embrace changes when they're fully informed of the rationale behind those changes. What?!?!?!? You mean that performance relates to worker involvement?!?!? Shocking!!!

Foremost Farms USA, a dairy cooperative in Wisconsin, decided it was important to reduce the variation in size of the blocks of its American-style cheese. The normal variation was 30-40 pounds on a 640 block of cheese. But due to a customer's demand for precise weight on its cheese, the company needed to reduce that variation. Naturally, top management sent a "directive" down to the line workers telling them of the new policy. Results were predictable, at least to readers of this blog:

At first, the initiative went well, recalls Doug Wilke, vice president of manufactured products.... But once managers stopped checking, workers resumed making cheese the old way: as fast as possible. "Weights started fluctuating," says Mr. Wilke.

Eventually, the company hired a communications consultant who developed a presentation with Mr. Wilke to explain the competitive threats the company faced and the changes it needed to make. Not surprisingly, workers appreciated the information and asked for more such meetings. As a result, along with other improvements, the weight of those cheese blocks varies a lot less.

Kudos to the company for deciding to talk to the workers and explain management decisions. But the company, the consultant, and the journalist all miss an even more important point: that actively involving workers in the process would lead to more satisfied employees and even better results.

The article maintains that the real managerial dilemma is "how to communicate directives so that workers follow them." But this approach implicitly treats workers as mindless automatons, lacking in the creativity that could improve the process.

A lean organization wouldn't simply tell workers to reduce variation in cheese weight. First, management would explain changing customer needs -- perhaps even sending workers to the customers (genchi genbutsu) so that they could see for themselves what the market requires. Then management would use the workers' creativity and experience to figure out how to make a product that meets customer requirements. In this way, workers would understand why the current situation has changed and would have an opportunity to problem solve part of the production process: how to reduce variability in the final cheese weight.

I believe the problem is with the notion of a "directive." There's a sense that a top-down order can't -- or shouldn't -- be questioned. There's also a unilateral quality to a "directive." These two elements combine to make "directives" extraordinarily ineffective at promoting long-term, sustainable change in behavior or process.

The opposite of the top-down directive is the practice of involving workers in decisions. This kind of worker involvement is a critical form of respect, and results in better processes and products.

Obviously, management has the right -- and the obligation -- to set goals for a firm. But translating goals into "directives" undercuts the firm's ability to actually achieve them, because "directives," by their very nature, don't take advantage of employees' talents, skills, and experiences (the eighth waste). It's far better for the workers to figure out how to improve the current state.

When Toyota preaches respect for people, it's not just because they want to be seen as a bunch of nice guys. It's because they want to improve their processes and achieve better results.

The real managerial problem then, is not how to communicate directives. It's how to build a company that's a problem-solving organization, in which workers have the responsibility, the authority, and the desire to make the appropriate changes. Fortunately, the Toyota Way provides a roadmap.

Error Proofing Your Meetings

By Dan Markovitz

Sometimes it's hard to spot errors in an office, much less error-proof the workspace. With so many value streams running through each knowledge worker, and so much of the value being intangible and invisible, error-proofing is tricky.

But if you consider that the goal of error proofing is to reduce waste, then Ikea has devised an ingenious form of error proofing: they've come up with a way to keep meetings focused. . . and short. Which is to say that the company has built in a method to reduce the time wasted in meetings that wander like a drunken sailor.

In an article about the design of the company's US headquarters, the New York Times noted that the building features

14 "huddle rooms," 10-foot by 10-foot cubes painted in primary colors and designed for small groups. The bright colors can be harsh, but that's part of the plan. . . . Meetings in them tend to be brief.

There's a picture of one of these rooms, too. It's a bit small (both the room and the photo), but it gives a pretty clear idea of what the feeling is:


It's hard to imagine wanting to spend a whole lot of time in such a... YELLOW environment. As a result, you'd probably be pretty considerate about getting to meetings on time, starting them on time, and getting the hell out of there on time.

Compare that to your company's meetings. Have you ever had a 30 minute meeting that ended at the designated time? For that matter, have you ever had a 30 minute meeting at all? Think of the collective muda created by one of those meetings that last longer than a Robert Byrd oration on the intricacies of Senatorial privilege.

You can argue that the color scheme might impair real productivity. I mean, can you really think clearly when you feel like you're being swallowed by a lemon and your retinas are screaming for mercy? (And imagine the red room. Yech!)

Nevertheless, the idea of building in waste inhibitors -- poka-yoke for the knowledge worker -- is pretty cool. I once worked for a boss who would lock the door to the conference room at the meeting start time. People only missed one meeting before figuring out that they better be there on time. I know of a company that holds their meetings standing up -- straying off topic is a bit less appealing when you're not resting your butt in an Aeron chair.

I don't know if any of these approaches is perfect. They all seem a bit heavy-handed. But if the result is a reduction of wasted time, then I applaud the effort.

"I Canna Get Warp Drive Back In Less Than Two Days, Captain!"

By Dan Markovitz:

(Mark's note: I saw this article and instantly thought of Dan, re: Lean in an office environment. The dynamics in this article reminded me of the typical dynamics in a non-Lean factory, where lots of expediting takes place, orders are given false due dates, and we even sometimes expedite some of the orders on the expedite list. Hospitals are similar, where many lab orders are "STAT" and octors routinely abuse the "STAT" guidelines because their orders/patients are obviously most important. Seems like basic human dynamics and human nature... and we think Lean can have a positive impact in breaking that cycle of expediting).

In today's Wall Street Journal, Jared Sandberg writes about the prevalence of false deadlines in the workplace. He cites egregious examples of deadlines that create havoc in workflow for absolutely no reason -- among them, a molecular biologist who was given a do-or-die deadline for a Thursday, only to find that her boss had taken off both Friday and the following Monday. As Sandberg eloquently puts it,

The most nettlesome of false deadlines are those imposed by a manager whose next breath appears to depend on the deadline being met but who, once it has been, behaves as though the work was less important than the office's NCAA betting pool.

This sort of behavior is not just irksome or irritating -- though it certainly is that. More importantly, these false deadlines are anathema to lean. They create turbulence in the value stream, undermine efforts at heijunka (leveling the flow of work), and most importantly, lead to the 3M's -- mura, muri and muda.

Workflow on a physical production line is well-planned out of necessity, because the cycle time is fixed. (In the short term, anyway. The factory can certainly make manufacturing improvements in the long term, but not when responding to a sudden and unexpected request. In the short term, the factory can only add or extend shifts in response to a sudden increase in demand.)

Workflow for tasks and projects in the office environment are a bit fuzzier, because the cycle times are unclear. How long does it really take to compile a budget spreadsheet? A marketing plan? A speech for the CEO? But whether workers are building spacecraft assemblies or budget spreadsheets, they must know their production schedule in order to level the flow of their work. And that means knowing what they're going to produce and what the deadline is. It's the manager's job to provide this information. Accurately.

False deadlines make it unnecessarily difficult to plan work, even with the more uncertain production time for knowledge workers. Just like factory workers, knowledge workers must scramble to meet tight deadlines, staying at the office late or working on weekends (leading to mura and muri). And since these false deadlines are always shorter than they need to be, they often result in lower-quality work and unnecessary expenses (muda).

To be fair, multiple value streams flow through knowledge workers and managers, making it difficult for them to move value forward smoothly. In addition to their primary jobs, they sit on committees, get roped into meetings, manage special projects, and must always be available to handle the inevitable crisis. Moreover, as Sandberg points out,

this era of high-velocity communications doesn't grant the breathing space that the sluggish postal service once did, and interruptions can easily obliterate daily agendas.

But with an increasing amount of work to do and a finite amount of time in which to do it, better planning and accurate deadlines are not a luxury; they're a necessity. A production line can't run smoothly without a clear production and delivery schedule, and neither can a business process.

Hidden within the catchy term "3M's" is an awful lot of human stress -- late nights, lack of sleep, strained family relations. Managers need to recognize the burden that false deadlines place on their staff.

Either that, or they can play Captain Kirk to their employee's Scotty on Star Trek. Scotty regularly padded his repair time (fourfold!) so that he could be seen as a miracle worker when he finished the job ahead of schedule.

And that may be a decent way to run a starship. But not your company.

The 5S Workplace: Cause or Effect?

By Dan Markovitz, Time Back Management:

A response to an earlier post...

Is messiness really beneficial?

I think the authors of A Perfect Mess make a silly distinction. On the one hand, you have order for order's sake. The authors argue that all those poor fools who arrange their pencils by hardness of lead are in love with order for no valid reason other than aesthetics. Or they're neurotic.

On the other hand, you have chaos in the service of creativity. The authors suggest that messiness enables people to get on with the really important things in their lives, rather than having their sock drawer arranged just right. And the time freed up by embracing chaos allows people to do wonderful things, like connecting two pieces of paper on their desks, and winning a Nobel Prize.

But they miss the point. Truly organized people aren't organized just for the sake of order. Rather, their organization is a RESULT of a process for dealing with all the stuff in their lives. These folks avoid interment in paper or email by having a clear methodology for handling all the business (and personal) responsibilities in their lives. By handling this stuff effectively, they avoid clutter and chaos.

So people shouldn't focus on getting organized. Rather, they should focus on a system for dealing with all the stuff that comes at them. And that will (help) create a 5S workspace. For example, doctors don't focus on getting their operating room organized. Rather, they have a strict process for preparing for an operation: they wash their hands in a certain way, they lay out their instruments in a certain way, they check the equipment in a certain way. . . and always the exact same way. Every time. The result of this system is a 5S workspace.

The authors of A Perfect Mess make much of the Nobel Prize that came about because someone connected two pieces of paper on his desk. I suppose you might be constructing a system that prevents you from curing cancer, or developing cold fusion. But that seems to me a bit like using the Powerball lottery as a retirement strategy. It *might* pay off. But most likely, you'll just be out a bunch of money.

How Do You Say "Lean" in Swedish?

By Dan Markovitz, Timeback Management:

The McKinsey Quarterly just published an interview with Peter Gossas, the president of Stockholm-based Sandvik Materials Technology, a leading producer of advanced alloys and ceramic materials. When he was appointed president in 2003, the company was making decent profits, but hardly excelling. Mr. Gossas described the challenge this way:

How can one awaken a sleeping giant with untapped potential, make it a little leaner and hungrier, and make it realize that, even if some units are doing well, it could do a lot better? It is like awakening a fat cat sleeping in the sun.

Mr. Gossas's choice of words notwithstanding, his first step was straight out of the traditional manufacturing playbook: layoff workers and reduce costs. But he quickly found that that approach didn't work. As he explains it,

We started off by using ordinary rationalization tools such as simply reducing manpower, which usually stimulates creativity and gets the organization interested in finding more efficient ways of working.

I had believed that this would lead to a good increase in productivity, but the result was actually that productivity fell slightly. When we analyzed the result, we discovered that because the organization had been largely unchanged for many, many years, an informal structure of key operators, unbeknownst to management, had been keeping the wheels turning. When we reduced staff levels, this informal organization lost steam. Clearly, we had to try something else.

Mr. Gossas responded with a typical Toyota approach: "genchi genbutsu." He went to the factory floor to see what was going on and to learn how the company could improve its operations:

We began with a diagnostic. I’ve always believed that by taking a one-hour walk through a company’s manufacturing and other departments and asking some questions along the way, one can get a good idea of how it is performing. So that’s what we did. We walked through, unit by unit, and evaluated strengths as well as gaps between where we were and where we should be.

Walking through the factories, finding out what his employees knew, understanding deeply what challenges they faced, and discovering solutions -- this is what ultimately led to the creation of what the company calls "the SMT business system,"

. . . a fancy name for something very simple—namely, the processes for seeking ways of working that can be defined as excellent or, in other words, the continual development, by every single unit, of the very best practices in all areas.

And in a statement that echoes Katsuaki Watanabe, despite his very obvious success in the past few years, Mr. Gossas is afraid. He doesn't want the company to become complacent, even with its (very decent) status quo:

We have come some way, but we are not ready, and we never will be. That’s in the nature of things. I get really nervous if managers say that their units have been very good at something for some time and are working in exactly the same way today. It’s a recipe for disaster. . . We cannot afford to rest on our laurels. The challenge is to keep up momentum. The day our fourth-quarter 2005 results were published coincided with us reaching our three-year financial targets, so we arranged a photograph of the management team standing on top of a pile of gravel. But when we looked at the photo, we thought, “Yes, success should be celebrated, but, hey, this is the wrong message.” So we added five bigger piles to symbolize mountains we have yet to climb.

There are still more similarities in approach with Toyota, but what's very clear is that Mr. Gossas is a leader who is willing to implement lean in its totality. For him and for his company, lean isn't just the managerial flavor of the month designed to reduce costs. Rather, its a perspective that permeates the organization from top to bottom, and leads to constant, relentless, pursuit of excellence. Reading his interview, you get the feeling that Mr. Gossas would never get fat and satisfied if he lucked into a hot product.

Mulally's Early Lean Leadership at Ford

By Dan Markovitz, Timeback Management

(Mark's note... Dan has been a unofficial, yet very welcome, contributor to the blog for a few weeks now. We should see him posting directly soon. But for now, here is a post he sent me via email).

On Friday, the WSJ published an article on Alan Mulally, Ford's new CEO. The article, taken together with the article on Katsuaki Watanabe and Toyota from two weeks earlier reveals a key difference between a lean approach to business and, well, business as usual.

The article on Ford states that:

As part of his push for uniformity, Mr. Mulally is moving Ford to combine its global operations, modifying its current structure of separate businesses by brand and region. Mr. Mulally was shocked to discover that the plan before his arrival was to "operate our eight Fords."

In the executive suite he shares with Chairman Bill Ford, Mr. Mulally says he asked Mr. Ford why he hadn't integrated the company.

He says Mr. Ford agreed that integration was desirable, but told him it was difficult. Every time Ford had considered forcing integration, a new hit product -- such as the Explorer, Taurus or F-series truck -- would come along and propel profitability without tough changes, explained the fourth-generation Ford leader....

Ford has tried before to cut vehicle-development costs through the strategy of engineering a car once to serve markets world-wide. In the 1990s, Ford also tried to undertake a sweeping reorganization to run as one company, globally, rather than as a collection of regional fiefdoms. But these prior efforts failed, in part because the company's executives and managers resisted the pressure to give up their turf.

So here's a company that's struggled for quite awhile, but never could find the executive commitment to improve, because every once in awhile they'd get a hit product. Now, contrast this institutional complacency with Toyota:

Toyota's chief executive officer is a worried man. He thinks Toyota is losing its competitive edge as it expands around the world. He frets that quality, the foundation of its U.S. success, is slipping. He grouses that Toyota's factories and engineering practices aren't efficient enough.... U.S. and European car makers have spent years struggling to overhaul outdated operations and work practices to better compete with Toyota. By some measures, some of those companies are catching up. Now, driven by a severe dose of institutional paranoia, Mr. Watanabe is trying to move the target.

Mr. Watanabe, 64 years old, wants kakushin, or revolutionary change in how Toyota designs cars and factories....

"We know our resources are stretched thin; there's no doubt about that," Mr. Watanabe says. "But at least we are beginning to know where our problems lie now. Our biggest fear is: What if those issues get stuffed in a desk drawer?"

Toyota -- profitable, growing, and ready to take the #1 spot -- is terrified. They have every reason in the world to continue business as usual, but they don't. The institutional culture -- that is to say, Lean -- makes it impossible to rest on their laurels. Continuous improvement (whether you call it kaizen or kakushin) is built into the company's DNA.

Does Ford stand a chance? Can Mulally make the necessary changes in how the business is run? He's got a tough row to hoe. It's not enough for him to see the need for improvement; it's not enough for him to squeeze out waste in manufacturing. He has to change the culture at Ford. He has to change the way people think and act.

Lean is a state of mind, not simply an exercise in cost reduction. And that state of mind must permeate every aspect of the organization, from the machinists to the accountants to the administrative assistants.

The Perils of Ignoring 5S in Offices

By : Daniel Markovitz, TimeBack Management

Note: This posting is from a guest Blogger, Dan Markovitz, founder and president of TimeBack Management a consulting firm in California. Dan has been quoted in Time.com, written for the Wall Street Journal, Industry Week and recently published a piece on the Superfactory website. I hope we'll have more contributions from Dan in the future. -- Mark Graban

The benefits of 5S in a manufacturing environment are obvious and well-documented. In an office environment, however, the benefits are just as real -- and the costs of ignoring them equally so.

Recently, I referred someone to a senior member at an executive search company. He's a perfect fit for their services: this company specializes in the recruitment of financial professionals, and he has a Stanford MBA, 15 years of experience, and tremendous analytical skills -- and he's actively looking for a new job. A match made in heaven.

And yet, the search firm never called him. One week went by, two weeks, then three. No contact. When I followed up with the search firm, the headhunter said that she just lost the piece of paper on which she scribbled his information. He quite literally got lost in the shuffle.
Her desk is a disaster: papers strewn everywhere, terrible organization, and no standard procedure to sort through the piles and deal with the information that's been piling up. It's no wonder that she forgot about him.

As a headhunter, her "work in process" consists of job seekers and companies looking for employees. And yet her workspace is so disorganized that she literally lost the very thing that she should be working on

He ended up finding a job on his own. Her firm, however, not only lost short-term revenue, but a long-term relationship.