Lean Isn't....personal

I find I spend a lot of time listening to people justify the things they do as being Value Added.  And at times they get quite upset when I suggest we "call their customer to make sure that doing X is adding Value for them."  I am told things like "the customer wouldn't understand why we have to do X so there's no point in even asking."

Really?  Are you kidding me?  Who are you Henry Ford with your black cars?  (no offence to one of the great Lean innovators of all time).

Look I am not insensitive to what it feels like to have most of what you love to do classified as Waste.  And I really wish there was a more "touchy-feely" word than Waste for things that are Non-Value Added.  I have written about my firm's own Lean journey where we identified over 94% of what we loved to do as Waste.  I admit it, it hurt.  It crushed our souls.  How could this be?

But more important than our own feelings we realized we were doing it because we had to.  Anyone in the consulting business will tell you that consultants are the canaries in the coal mine.  Long before things actually go bad, if there is even a hint of a downturn in the economy the first thing companies cut is their consulting budget.  So months before the recession of 2008 we were already feeling the effects.

Facing a bleak revenue outlook we turned our Lean microscopes on our own internal process.  And as I said it was not pretty.  I started our Lean journey by telling my associates "look, we tell our clients that if they follow Lean they can take 40%, 50% and more in terms of costs and lead time out of their processes.  So if we follow our own advice we should be able to take out far more than that."

The result was the development of a suite of products we call LeanOnMe that we deliver for approximately 10% of the cost of our original engagements.  And furthermore we now eliminate virtually all of the complaints and frustrations clients have with consultants (I won't list them here, anyone reading this already knows).

My point is this, don't take Lean personally.  You don't hear smokers vehemently defending cigarettes as being good for them.  And diabetics don't get all upset when you suggest that cake might not be the most healthy choice they can make.  Realizing what's Waste and what's not doesn't make it easy to change.  But always keep in mind that the first step to improvement is admitting that you have a problem.  "Hi my name is Kevin, and there is Waste in my process."