Product Description
Lean Leadership is written for a very specific but large audience. The entire business world is aggressively pursing “lean” in all of its manifestations. Lean manufacturing, lean operations, lean service and so on are becoming the mantra of competition squeezed business. Lean Leadership addresses this audience in a manner that no other book on the market matches. Lean Leadership provides senior managers and leaders with an in-depth and broad exposure to the fundamental background knowledge and implementation methods that drive all enterprises that are successful over the long-term. It has been the author’s experience, as both an executive and a consultant, that senior managers are willing and eage… More >>
Lean Leadership : From Chaos to Carrots to Commitment
The author makes one absolutely great point — the use of external consultants. The over hundred comapanies that I have seen the insides of, every one of them has made an initial failed attempt to implement Lean without an external consultant as all of these companies felt that it should be simple. Most of the wiser ones, the ones that stayed in business, have then gone on to hire an external consultant to develop a Lean roadmap and follow that roadmap, and only then did they realize that Lean implementation was “deceptively” simple. Being an external consultant myself in my past life [I now work for just a single company] and having worked with many of them, I know that it is almost impossible for an insider to have the vision and the experience of failure that is needed to develop and follow a Lean roadmap for its employer. An outside consultant does not necessarily tell you what to do [most of it you would know yourself], but he or she will tell you what NOT to do and steer you away from making million dollar mistakes, if you would listen. I have noticed that most management simply do not get the simple fact that Lean implentation has very little to do with “furnitue” movement on the factory floor, which any insider with a little bit of industrial engineering knowledge can do, Rating: 4 / 5
In this book, as well as “Office Kaizen: Transforming Office Operations into a Strategic Competitive Advantage,” William Lareau provides some of the rudimentary tools and theories of Lean practices. However, both books fall seriously short of providing the comprehensive, straight-forward lean techniques and philosophies that both management and their employees require to introduce, improve and sustain lean processes over the long-term. In short, I found that his books actually violate Lean principles in that they contain hundreds of pages of “Munda” (waste)!
Lareau correctly argues that for any business to successfully integrate a Lean program into its structure, it needs to develop and sustain overwhelming employee acceptance and involvement in the program. Unfortunately, Lareau’s psychological foundations for his theories on human motivations are outdated. Much has been revealed in the field of psychology in the past 15-20 years with which Lareau clearly needs to acquaint himself.
Lareau makes repetitive attempts to motivate the reader to his way of thinking through tiresome war characterization analogies and often unfounded attacks to minimize or discredit past business improvement programs and their proponents in favor of his own.
He attempts to develop and reinforce the belief that Lean requires such levels of training and business restructuring, that the reader must conclude that to successfully implement and sustain Lean, they must invest heavily and for a lengthy duration, in an outside Lean consultant. His books are essentially marketing tools for his own consultant firm.
Incidentally, this book lacks both an index and a bibliography. Perhaps Lareau finds that citing his sources and crediting the specific works of others are an unnecessary inconvenience. Rating: 1 / 5
What a book! If your leadership team lacks passion, commitment, purpose and capability….don’t read any further because your organization cannot eat its carrrot everyday! Settle the leadership requirements and move to chapter two and enjoy the elegant simplicity to running LEAN everyday.
We are very pleased that the book guided our planning to transform our organization of “individuals working to do a good job” into a true “team” of people & processes that work everday to make the impossible ….possible. With results like 55% less direct labor and 122% increase in sales over the past three years…..”EVERYONE IN OUR BUSINESS LOVES TO EAT CARROTS”! Rating: 5 / 5