Part 1: Introduction

A Note About Transformation

 

"To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often."

 

~Winston Churchill

 

          Before I begin this work, I want to take a moment to talk about what is involved in transformation.  I want to start with this, because leading operations are always about transforming those operations.  This is based on the principle that value changes over time.  We cannot do, tomorrow, what we did today and serve the customer in the same way.  Just as their customers are changing, they are our customers, and they will change, which means, by default, we must change.  We must line up with our suppliers to change with us.  This is very important to understand, because if our teams are not good at anything else, we should make them good at changing.

          Mark DeLuzio shared with me that on his first trip to Toyota, in 1990, in Japan he was told, “What makes a world-class company is their ability to solve problems.  Even the great Toyota has problems, but we only solve our problems once.”

          Prior to Henry Ford mass production of the Model T, a used car market existed, but sales were often handled privately or traded in for a new model.  When people traded in their used cars, the cars were sometimes re-sold or used for commercial purposes, prior to the large-scale manufacturing of the automobile. 

          When we think of Henry Ford mass producing the Model T, this is well understood, but a byproduct of this accomplishment was the formalization of the used car market.  Did this change value and the way new car makers thought about requirements?  Certainly.  There were now cheaper versions of their vehicles being sold with some miles on them.  To compete with this market, they not only had to compete with the price, but also the options had to advance, because customers could get something similar for less money in the used market.

          My first experience with transformation was when I was eighteen-far before I understood the principles that I understand today.  After dropping out of high school in the tenth grade, spending time in a rehab facility, for drugs and alcohol abuse, and barely being able to perform basic functions, I realized that the path I was on was not sustainable.  It took years for me to get through college, eventually earning a degree in Mechanical Engineering, followed by an MBA in Servant Leadership.  The funny thing is that everyone sees it at the end, when we walk across that stage and the papers are placed in our hands, but no one sees the hard cuts that were made, that were felt deeply.  There was time to get clean, when it felt like I would surely die.  This was followed by the old friends that couldn’t understand why I couldn’t live that life anymore.  One might say that my life has been a Kaizen.  It is hard when you must stop answering the phone when you know it is the people that you knew your whole life on the other end.  Change hurts.  There is no way around this pain, but the pain is necessary for growth.  We must decide at what point the growth hurts less than the path forward.  As a leader, we must bring our teams to this point.  People who are okay with ‘good enough’ will never know what it is like to be great.  In many areas of life, good enough works, but there are critical areas where that mindset will destroy us.  Any vision that we cast should have this in mind.

          Transformation has two people elements to it:  The coach and the coached.  The one guides the other, like how a doctor guides a patient.  The patient has a problem.  Sometimes the patient doesn’t even know it.  Through research, experiments and general observation, the doctor looks at the life of the patient and evaluates issues that are rising through medical diagnosis.  Through experiment, they determine what things may be causing these issues and put a plan in place to turn them from the bad path that lies ahead. 

          Now, even with this in mind, if we have a doctor who tells a patient that heavy liquor consumption is harming their liver, but the patient likes the way that the liquor makes them feel, they may choose not to accept any plan that the doctor comes up with.  Likewise, they may even say that the doctor is not intelligent or doesn’t know anything about the situation.  It is very important to realize that this is not a reflection on the doctor, but rather on the patient.  Doctors are wrong at times, just like patients, and it is this back and forth that creates the struggle for change.  When we stick to the scientific method of thinking and experimentation, it helps us get to root cause.  It is worth noting that no matter how much information we bring, at times it will fall into deaf ears and there are reasons for that.

          Several years back I had an interaction with an executive manager, where I was asked to do a Six Sigma analysis of a potential quality problem.  I spent two weeks going to the Genba, collecting data, & running extensive analysis on root cause, validating this with all the stakeholders.  Together, as a team, we learned a lot about the problem.

          Later that week, when I entered the meeting, excited to present to this leader about what we learned, I sat at the table and listened patiently to everyone else talk about what they had worked on and what they had learned.  Together, the team had learned a lot.  When it was time for me to present, the executive leader stood up and said, “I don’t care what is on your presentation, or what your data says, we have already decided on the path forward and that is where we are going, but feel free to talk.”  This is not what respect for people looks like.

          You too will face these situations, and we all handle them differently.  Sometimes it is better to talk, to get the information from the rest of the team, and sometimes it is better to just fold up your papers and take them with you when you leave.  There isn’t one answer, but I have done both at times in my career.

          I will start this book off with a set of soft skills, followed by a functional view of how operations work.  The reason that I will do this is because soft skills are necessary to execute functional skills.  I would encourage you, as you read this book, to think about five things that you will take away from it.  I often do this when I read books.  What you will find is that when you are finished you can clearly state five things that you learned, but over time, you will find that there were many other things that stuck, that you may not have realized at the time.

          If you think about a garden plant for a minute: How does it grow? We can place the seeds in the ground, water them every day, pull the weeds, and for a long time, nothing happens.  Depending on our leadership’s understanding of this principle, soft skills become very important very quickly.  How do we motivate a team that sees nothing spring forth from the ground, let alone a blooming flower?  The only things that teams see now is dirt, a lot of work, pulling weeds, and the hot sun of leadership beating down on them for not moving fast enough.  If we don’t have the ability to motivate ourselves, and others, we will be tempted to abandon the ship or to shortcut the process. 

          Due to entropy, the weeds grow on their own.  We will never have to water them.  They will always be there, and when we pull them, they will come back, but the flower must constantly have input, and if it goes away, it will not come back.  It must be re-planted, and each time it dies, people believe in it a little less.

          My goal in the following chapters is to demonstrate what happens beneath the dirt when the seed is planted, as well as what must happen above the ground to see it through to the full bloom that was intended.