E-letters

Since the publication of lean concepts and its practice in India the world has changed significantly. World economy is in a complete mess and all leading economies have been struggling to overcome the financial mess that they had created knowingly. It started from Japan, then moved to United States and now it is with Europe. Which country will be next? Everyone is guessing!

Will it be India? Not likely, unless and until we do not start overlooking our strong fundamentals of internal focus and high savings. We need to adopt better management practices that lead to lasting growth. We need to find better ways to design our processes that creates more and more value and less and less waste. That is how the world has been growing.

Unfortunate part is that a growing entity takes an inflection and start increasing waste in their processes that results into decreasing profitability and increasing debt levels. At some point the debt becomes self sustaining and pulls down the entity eventually. The entity can be a person, household, state, country or world as a whole. Current global melt down has been nothing but unwinding of prolonged and sustained debt levels which lost its imbalance and is now trying to discover its balance. The globe is now more interconnected and many a times problems originate from outside and we are swept in.

What we need to do?

We need to change our way of managing. We must recognize that value flows horizontally to customer and we are fundamentally organized vertically. The top looks for heroes who are deployed to fight out crisis. The hero finds out some tools and techniques and deploys dedicated experts who optimize the point of crisis and becomes real hero in the management eye. What is missed out is that the point optimization squeezes out the waste to some other part of the value stream and the losses are just redistributed to raise their head again in a bigger and all pervasive manner.

Until we focus our vision on the entire value stream, that is essentially horizontal, and all touching the value stream are not involved in managing and problem solving in a united manner, achievements will be always be illusory and improvements will remain unsustainable.

The real challenge is to make people understand how their value streams currently work and to design improved value streams that are configured rationally and are manageable and adaptable to rapidly changing real world conditions. To do this the primary work of the managers essentially boils down to:

• Gain agreement on few important things (strategy management)
• Deploy strategy with deeper understanding of problem and its root causes through PDCA cycle encompassing the value stream as a whole.
• Stabilize the organization ( Standardized work with standardized management and Kaizen)
• Create next generation of lean managers (Repetitive Gemba and PDCA)

Dhirendra Kumar Dubey
Lean Management Institute of India- www.leaninstitute.in

Quick Links

Join the Lean Community