Author Archive
Date: 18 May, 2011
Posted by: David Adams in: Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence | Uncategorized
Dude, You Need Innovation! I just Googled (yep, it’s a verb now…) the word “innovation”. As of this date, there were “about” 201,000,000 results. You can discern something about a topic by the number of Google results there are. Innovation is a big deal these days. It may be a simple cloaking device for the real issue: organizations need to drive out cost without driving out people. To me, this sounds like a simple equation for Operational Excellence, at least the KCOE version of it. We aim for mutual trust and respect and the effect is this: costs drop. You win and your team...
The Bias for Action: Initiative and Decisiveness I am still running slightly behind my plan to discuss these 12 Leadership Truths (based on the United States Marine Corps’ Fourteen Leadership Traits). This month I will be thinking through initiative and decisiveness. Last month I talked about Judgment and in January I discussed Justice. We have had a lively discussion so far ranging from Twitter commentary to personal phone calls. So far, folks seem to resonate with our thoughts on the leadership truths that need to be present to support a culture of mutual trust and respect, the culture...
Date: 04 Apr, 2011
Posted by: David Adams in: Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence | Uncategorized
Give Those Tired Old Lean Tools a Rest… This is a picture of a process map where the different colors represent information and service (think product) flows as well as value-added or non-value-added steps in the process. If you were a casual observer watching me work with this multi-disciplinary team of engineers, detailers, leaders and craftsmen, you may think, “This guy is doing a Kaizen Event.” But, I’m not. In fact, this is a picture from Week 5 of a Quality Control (QC) Circle meeting. If you ask the team what they are doing, they’d simply reply, “Problem...
Do These Six Things to Improve Your Judgement S0, exercising some poor judgment, I missed last month’s installment in my resolution to write about the 14 leadership traits each month. Last month – February – was Trait Number Two: Judgment. In hopes of catching up, I am offering six practices that – if honed to a skill – will absolutely improve your judgment. One: Go and See for Judgment OK, so I’m not fooling anyone into thinking that these six practices are original. They are right out of the KCOE Operational Excellence System playbook. Now that I’ve...
Lean Leadership: leading with Justice The Definition of Justice for Lean Leadership jus⋅tice [juhs-tis] –noun the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness: to uphold the justice of a cause. rightfulness or lawfulness, as of a claim or title; justness of ground or reason: to complain with justice. the moral principle determining just conduct. conformity to this principle, as manifested in conduct; just conduct, dealing, or treatment. the administering of deserved punishment or reward. (Source: Dictionary.com) Let me begin by making some suppositions. First,...
Keep is Real, Keep it Simple: World Class Leadership Considering World Class Leadership and What Happened Last Year As I consider the year ahead, I was struck by the number of questions I fielded last year on basic leadership in the context of “lean” or our own KCOE (operational excellence) System. It would seem that despite several thousand years of knowledge recorded on the subject, we still prefer to chase the latest fad or the hippest guru for inspiration. My resolution for 2011 is to bring twelve simple lessons to you over the next 12 months. They are simple because they a generally...
In the KCOE tradition of semi-humorous parodies, we offer our own tongue-in-cheek version of the twelve days of Christmas. We’d love to hear and see how you sing our new carol: submit your “Twelve Days of Lean Christmas” Video to contact@engagingkcoe.com. We will judge the best video and reward the winning team a $100 gift card to the merchant of their choice. We’ll choose the winner on 03 January 2011. The winner will be chosen based on creativity (not singing ability!). We wish you and your teams and families the very best for this sacred time of year. (sung to...
Date: 16 Dec, 2010
Posted by: David Adams in: Coaching Stories | Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence
I woke up today with the notion that I needed to clear up or spread the word about the two daily leadership questions that we promote in our KCOE System for lean leadership | Operational Excllence leadership. I had a couple of clients thinking about this yesterday, so I thought I’d do some quick teaching on it. I posted the video on YouTube here: Leading in Lean | Operational Excellence Systems| The Two Leadership Questions
Note: The following is part of a series written and delivered as a presentation to SMC Business Council’s Manufacturing Group on 05.13.2010. I am sharing it with our blog readers to stimulate a discussion. Feel free to weigh in and give me your comments. I’ll be posting it over the next few weeks to allow time for the discussion to evolve. A special thanks to Tom Henschke, newly appointed President at SMC for the opportunity to share the message. The Premise: Your Lean System Might Stink… In order to produce world-class results, lean or operational excellence must...
lean What lean IS and what it Isn’t In 1996, almost 15 years ago, Jim Womack wrote a book. The book was a follow up to his first book, The Machine That Changed the World. This then new book, Lean Thinking, was really the book that would change the face of manufacturing for a long time. I credit Jim Womack with being the granddaddy of what we in North America call “lean”. Womack coined the phrase as he tried to describe how some really good manufacturers and one really great manufacturer did their business, particularly their production operations. Womack says that in 1987...
