Twenty years after the term “lean production” was introduced there have been countless books, immeasurable benchmarking studies, and innumerable lean implementations. The problem? No second Toyota.
For comparison? Toyota first one attention for affordable, reliable, fuel efficient small cars. It added mid sized and large autos, cars, trucks, and SUVs, the luxury brand–Lexus, and the entry brand–Scion, globalized its design and production capacity, and ran well ahead with the hybrid drive.
Certainly, in the auto industry, no one has leaned to dominate its rivals through speed, agility, quality, and cost. Any examples in another industry?
If so, who?
If not, why not?
There is a widely held but mistaken impression that senior leaders set direction with the achievement of those objectives delegated down and out to others less influential and ‘important.’ That approaches assumes an inherent simplicity in creating and operating the systems on which success depends and the straight forwardness of aligning what is to be accomplished with the how it will be achieved.
Those are wildly false assumptions, particularly in a world in which globalization and technological invention accelerate the velocity at which competition occurs. In the world’s best organizations, leadership recognizes this reality and responds to it appropriately, accepting responsibility both for setting strategy and ensuring its sound execution.
But how can that be accomplished without overloading the core? It means that seniors must lead, not merely by telling others what do to but by investing time and effort–top down and center out–in developing innovative and inventive capacity broadly and deeply throughout the organization.
Here is a link to an article, “Unleasing the Problem Solving Capabilities of Employees,” from Target Magazine, by Karen Wilhelm, describing efforts by leadership at DTE, the large Midwestern utility, to do just that, by applying lessons from the world’s greatest in its own work.
Best wishes,
Steve Spear
Author of Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders
Outdistance the Competition (McGraw-Hill: October 2008)
• http://chasingtherabbitbook.com for preface, forward, intro, and blog.
• “Leadership and Innovation in a Commoditized World,” new piece on HarvardBusiness.Org