Thirty pages into a painful book on organizational behavior by an academic named Howard Schwartz, I came to a chapter in which he expounds on the anti-social behavior of large organizations - and the examples he cites to make his case are from the movie Silkwood. I hope Mr. Schwartz gets a chance to read this because I want him to know that, at last word, Meryl Streep is fine. She did not really die from radiation exposure propagated by evil business people. In fact, she is probably lounging in some spa as you are reading this. For that matter, it may come as a surprise to Mr. Schwartz to know that neither John Travolta nor Gene Hackman are really attorneys, and neither of them actually saved the world from evil manufacturers. In fact, I cannot think of a single movie ever made that comes close to reflecting manufacturing as it is.

Mr. Schwartz is hardly the only one who takes popular culture as a legitimate source for intellectual argument. Consider this from a prominent George Mason University economics wizard: “Service-sector jobs are the most desirable” and “Ever hear a parent say ‘I want my boy to grow up to be a pipe-fitter!’” Th term ‘manufacturing job’ is synonymous with ‘dirty’, ‘dangerous’, ‘oppressive’ and the term ‘manufacturing manager’ is on par with a pre-Civil War plantation overseer in the common culture.

Until manufacturing is viewed with the respect afforded just about any other line of work, it is hard to imagine that lean manufacturing will be taken seriously. Of course, the opposite of the Western disdain for manufacturing is the Toyota view. Fujio Cho, in the unlikely event he would ever care about them, is apt to need someone to explain stock derivatives to him when he takes over as Toyota’s chairman next month, but he won’t need anyone to explain manufacturing. Respect for the importance of manufacturing and the value placed on people who have done it well at Toyota goes a long way toward explaining their success compared to its competitors.

The practical fallout from the cultural disregard for manufacturing is all around us. The University of Arizona has a very aggressive program for turning its leading edge research in optics technology into entrepreneurial endeavors, bringing in wheelbarrows full of venture capital and spawning over 1,000 small manufacturers over the last few decades. At the same time, there is virtually no manufacturing management taught at the U of A. For that matter, there is no MEP in the Tucson region. Very few of the 1,000+ manufacturing start-ups have survived.

From the academic scientists who conjure up this Star Wars stuff, to the University administration to the venture capitalists, the prevailing attitude seems to be that if you dream up a great product, manufacturing will somehow take care of itself. Any collection of unemployed bums can be gathered off the street corners to make the whiz bang innovations. The U of A model is just a small scale example of national policy in the U.S. and the thinking that is sweeping through Europe. Innovation is the new rallying cry! Dream up more and better inventions - the higher tech the better! What we need are more engineers and scientists to do more of the sort of work the U of A has been churning out.

Who is going to make all of these innovative products? I suppose the plan is to round up all of the out of work extras from Silkwood, Class Action, A Civil Action and the rest of the Hollywood play list and have them run it. What else are we to think when the ‘Manufacturing Czar’ is a former marketing manager from a small carpet making company?

As I have often pointed out, lean manufacturing is almost non-existent in the colleges and universities - at least in the mainstream programs. An accounting professor at Georgia Tech recently explained that Lean Accounting is not part of the curriculum because the school has to respond to job requirements for its graduates, and there is no great call for lean manufacturing skills. I think he may be misreading the market, as evidenced by the fact that the MEP run in conjunction with Georgia Tech is one of the best and the busiest in the nation. Manufacturers in Georgia can’t seem to learn about lean fast enough.

That scenario plays out everywhere. MIT and Michigan run great lean education programs - but not for mainstream students. Manufacturing is all but ignored in the standard business curriculum. Wharton publishes operations management advice - almost exclusively devoted to outsourcing management. The universities establish these adjunct programs in responce to enormous pressure from the manufacturing community , while the tenured faculty rolls on viewing manufacturing as work for lesser intellects.

In many companies, lean manufacturing does not take hold because manufacturing is viewed with a combination of ignorance and disdain. The notion that manufacturing can be the greatest source of profits, rather than finance and brand management, is inconceivable to people who think that having your kids work in a factory for a living is a sign of bad parenting.

In Japan, China and throughout Asia, manufacturing management is viewed as a respected, honorable profession. The people who have positions of authority and influence in factories are admired. In the West, manufacturing people are described as “the slugs making turbines and lightbulbs“.

If we do not work to restore manufacturing as an honorable profession, soon enough all of the ’slugs making turbines and lightbulbs’ - and cars and furniture and just about everything else - will be Asian where the ’slugs’ get the respect they deserve.

I came across an article in a publication called Tooling & Production titled Overruling Parkinson’s Law that is right out of the manufacturing stone age. A guy named Steve Rose wrote about “Parkinson’s Law”, which states that the work will expand to fill the time available.

Mr. Rose writes, “Parkinson’s Law cannot rule. Company culture can’t allow an individual to set his or her own work performance. The organization must set a level of expectation to the employees that make the system work more efficiently. The old saying of “I am doing the best I can” may not be realistic because it means “I am taking as long as I want” to achieve a task.”

It struck me that Mr. Rose is a man born too late. He would have risen to great heights at General Motors or General Electric in the 1950’s. The problem is that Tooling & Production is not a stone age publication, generally speaking, and it typically has a lot of good lean information in both its news and editorial content. People management, however, is beyond the purview of Tooling & Production. It is pretty much a hard core manufacturing engineering rag with lots of good stuff about machining and cutting technology.

Mr. Rose and his associates do not have the exclusive franchise on leading edge thinking about lean in their area of expertise, but appalling ignorance of lean in the other aspects of manufacturing. It seems to be quite common, in fact. There are all kinds of lean forums and publications, each aimed at the people making a living in one functional area of manufacturing or another, including the industrial engineers, the quality folks, supply chain people, accounting and so forth. One common characteristic of these forums seems to be a very static view of the rest of manufacturing. Mr. Rose is a prime example - he no doubt thinks way out on the leading edge of lean manufacturing technology, but assumes that the rest of manufacturing still operates by the old tried and true principles of the past.

I am spending next week in Las Vegas where I am keynoting the International Lean/Six Sigma Conference and I will have a chance to hobnob with the some of the smartest manufacturing quality people in the land. If it runs true to form for such gatherings, I fully expect their knowledge of lean accounting, shop floor control and flow principles, and lean management to be almost nil. To see the state of specialization and separation in action, go out and join any one of the lean forums on the net. Every day you will see folks comment in their area of expertise with an amazing depth of knowledge, then follow it up in their next post with a shocking level of ignorance in another area of manufacturing.

We have all grown up in our careers with a functional, vertical view of things. The career path for the quality inspector is through the Quality Department, rising up to some day become the corporate quality director, or some such high level super-specialist. The I.E.’s all aim to become the I.E. Manager and the cost accountants dream of sitting in the Controller’s chair some day. The problem is that lean manufacturing requires a different sort of organizational architecture.

The lean company is not composed of vertically aligned functional departments - it is a horizontal set up, aligned along value streams. At the AME Champions Conference a few weeks ago, the CEO’s in attendance were concerned, with good reason, about their management skill set. In looking at the value streams in their plants, and growing in their understanding of the imperative to structure, measure and manage their plants by processes and value streams, rather than functionality, they realized that they had a big problem: Their plants may have had four distinct value streams, but they did not have four people in their entire manufacturing organization remotely qualified to manage the value streams. They had more than four smart, hard working leaders, to be sure; but these people were each functional specialists with very little knowledge of the other functions.

No matter how expert and intelligent the quality manager might be, if he or she has no knowledge of the accounting or scheduling systems, and has never supervised more than a couple of people, that person is not qualified to be in charge of a value stream - especially one in a plant in transition to lean. With so much changing to a different model, people need leaders with clear vision and the ability to sort through the fog of change to assure that the plant is realigned along the correct principles. That is no place for a manager to get on the job training in the MRP system and HR policies.

It seems clear that, as manufacturing transitions to a lean model, there will be less and less need for people whose knowledge and experience is limited to one function. The new manufacturing manager must understand manufacturing in its entirety. The career path for manufacturing leadership must be cross functional, rater than vertical. A young quality engineer should spend a couple of years getting well grounded in quality, then jockey for a move to the materials management group in a non-quality position for a couple of years. People who have solid multiple functional skill sets will be the value stream managers in the future. People who define their roles and their careers by function will find themselves increasingly unable to make a sigmificant contribution.

If there is an underlying theme to lean manufacturing, it is the realization that manufacturing is an incredibly complicated, completely inter-related system with millions of variables moving at the same time. Lean can be hard to understand because it is more a set of principles by which that complexity is driven, rather than a set of detailed rules. The failed traditional model of manufacturing was built around the assumption that manufacturing could be simply modeled and run by a computer - each cost had one driver and a linear relationship to that driver, the right quantity could be calculated according to EOQ and entered into an MRP system, how long a person should take to do each step of each job could be calculated to four decimal point precision by a guy with a stopwatch - none of which turned out to be true.

The days of you worrying about running your department ignorant of the next, trusting the logic in the accounting and manufacturing computer systems to put all of the functional pieces together are gone. It is becoming obvious that developing multi-skilled managers is more important to the success of lean manufacturing than developing multi-skilled production workers. But as John Mellencamp says in the song, “Ain’t That America?”. Here we are making a big fuss over what the hourly employees and unions need to do to get direct labor aligned along the value streams, without ever stopping to think that those of us in management have an even greater need to change first.

A veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of great American thinkers who, well, think great things, I guess, got together in Washington a while back under the guise of something called The National Summit on Competitiveness and poured barrels of perfume on the U.S. manufacturing pig in an effort to pretty the thing up. Nobody there talked about factories, however. From what I can gather, that is probably because very few people in attendance ever really worked in one. Nobody there talked about Wall Street and the basic U.S. manufacturing finance model that creates incentives to build inventory, compromise quality and wage war on production workers, either. The subject of lean manufacturing never came up

The views of these great thinkers centered around the need for more ‘innovation’ and, naturally, the need for more and better educated people to do the innovating. I can hardly find fault with a recommendation that we put more money into education and beef up the skills level of the workforce and the number of scientists and engineers strolling out of the hallowed halls of America’s universities, any more than I can criticize your mother’s apple pie recipe. This is hardly going to fix American manufacturing, however. The thought process and values of the people tasked with restoring our competitiveness can be pretty clearly understood by reading the report that was issued from Senator Joe Lieberman’s office. The title tells it all: “Offshore Outsourcing and America’s Competitive Edge: Losing Out In the High Technology R&D Service Sectors“. This year old white paper from the distinguished gentleman was deemed so important that the council reissued the thing. It basically says that losing production jobs is just a reality of the new global economy - get used to it - but when companies outsource computer geeks, now that’s a national crisis. (You can see that the scorn for factory workers is not limited to senior managers of the publicly held manufacturers. The esteemed senator is a lot more concerned about losing work done by educated voters too.)

The council really bought into the theory of the I-Cubed economy, as put forth by a think tank called the Athena Alliance. The I-Cubed economy is based on the notion that innovation, information and Intangibles are the core of the American economy. Factories, of course, are all about tangibles, however, but it does not look like there is room for them in 21st century America, according to these folks. The guy with the biggest brain at Athena basically says as much. According to Ken Jarboe, “At the risk of sounding like a heretic, I have to say that quality and lean production is sooo last century.” I don’t think Mr. Jarboe sounds like a heretic, he just sounds like he is about sixteen.

One would think that NAM, the National Association of Manufacturers, would be the voice of reason at such a gathering but, sadly, this is not the case. The president of NAM is John Engler who has the same manufacturing resume as Senator Lieberman - that is to say, he is also a life long politician who could not tell you the difference between MRP and CNC. NAM, a good enough organization, does not actually exist to protect and advance the interests of manufacturing, it exists to protect and advance the interests of manufacturing owners, and there is an ocean of difference between the two. NAM lobbies hard and long for government tax breaks, regulatory relief and protection from foreign competition. In short, their goal is to increase the amount of money left over in the pockets of the company owners, and how that plays out in the factories and for workers is not their focus.

The disheartening conclusion of all of this is that there is nobody in Washington or at the national level in any capacity speaking for lean manufacturing, and pointing out the fundamental problems in our financial models and our basic precepts of management that are undermining lean manufacturing and are the true cause of our eroding competitiveness. In Rebirth of American Industry, there is a chapter titled ‘Call To Action” that attempts to tell these very folks what they must do to help reverse the course of manufacturing in America. I doubt that any of them will read the book however, because it is “sooo last century”.

You’re on your own, folks. The only think tank you have assisting you in your lean manufacturing effort is the bathtub you collapse into after another day of swimming upstream at the plant. Take heart, though. Your kids won’t know what a factory is, but they will all have careers as ‘innovators of intangibles’, whatever that means.