The idea of lean manufacturing has been around since Womack, Jones and Roos came out with “The Machine That Changed The World: The Story of Lean Production” in 1991. The Toyota Production System, upon which lean is based, began to emerge from the manufacturing fog better than ten years before that. Since then, the track record of the lean experts - mostly in the consulting field - has not been particularly good. In fact, one study asserted that less than 2% of the companies that launched ‘lean initiatives’ accomplished anything discernable at the bottom line.

The long over due shakeout of the lean consulting field has begun. The imperative to become lean has been so strong that it seems most anyone who had read a book or two by Shigeo Shingo could hang out a shingle declaring himself to be a lean consultant and make a pretty good living. Lean philosophy books became management ‘must reads’ even though they often added little or nothing to the body of knowledge. Whether the consultants only knew lean as a series of kaizen events, or they knew that, although kaizen events alone will not make a company lean but they are a relatively painless and they make companies think they are getting lean, the event based approach to lean has run its course. Big consulting firms peddling ‘kaizen in a box’ - prepackaged, one size fits all, lean manufacturing through kaizen events - are collapsing as well they should.

The same is true for the lean tools salesmen. They defined lean as a bunch of Toyota-based shop floor parlor tricks - kanbans, U-shaped cells and the like - and promised Toyotaesque results to those who made their factories look like a mythical version of a Toyota plant. Like the kaizen event, that shallow version of lean contributed to the 98% failure rate as well, and the experts promoting the simple notion that looking lean is the equivalent of being lean are falling by the wayside, as well.

We seem to be entering a sobering new era in which lean manufacturing is fully understood as a radically different concept of management, driven by a radically different concept of manufacturing economics. The transformation from the traditional model to a lean model will be difficult and complicated. The expert who claims the knowledge to guide a company through it will have to have both depth and breadth of manufacturing knowledge.

As one of those lean consultants in the middle of the changing landscape, it is always tempting to promise easy results - just hire me and your lean journey will be a walk in the park on a sunny day. But that is the lie that is finally catching up with many of the folks in my line of work.

It is far better for all concerned for me to be honest about lean from the get go: It will be a lot of hard work. It will probably take your company five years or more to completely make the transformation. The human and culture obstacles along the way will be daunting. Everyone from the CEO on down will have an enormous relearning task to do that wil touch every aspect of their jobs. And I can’t do it for you. The best I can do is to teach, coach, and encourage, but you and the people in your company will have to do all of the hard work.

As much as we all wish the promise of the easy lean peddlers were true, it’s not. But as tough as the truth is to face, the rate of lean success in the U.S. is on the verge of a great improvement as a result of our collective willingness to face reality at long last.

I have never been particularly big on defining Lean Manufacturing as something built on ‘Two Pillars’ or “Three Cornerstones’, one of which being ‘Respect for people’ of ‘Employee involvement’. I do know, however, that an essential element of manufacturing success is getting people fully engaged and committed to the improvement effort. The old model of a few people at the top controlling everything and calling all the shots doesn’t work. There is not enough time in the day to direct and control all of the details in even the simplest manufacturing process, even if the guys at the top were smart enough to do it in the first place. Success can only come from empowering the people closest to the action to make decisions, solve problems and keep things moving in the right direction.

Engaging and empowering people has nothing to do with liking those people. It has everything to do with respect.

Nor is lean rocket science. It does not take a factory full of geniuses to do it. On the other hand, a factory is not about to become lean when its management is just plain stupid. A certain degree of basic intelligence is necessary.

So here we have the Gold’n Plump Poultry company in Minnesota being sued for discrimination by nine Somali employees. It seems as though the Somalis are Muslims and want to take a couple minutes five times a day to pray. Gold’n Plump can’t seem to figure out a way to “balance their religious practices with the realities of a manufacturing line”. The Somalis say that the Gold’n Plump bosses even followed them into the restroom during regular breaks to make sure no prayin’ was going on in there. Peggy Brown is the HR director at the chicken factory and she made it clear that Gold’n Plump has no legal obligation to let the Somalis pray.

If this stuff is even partially true, the likelihood of Gold’n Plump achieving world class excellence is exactly zero. A company whose flexibility and problem solving skills are so stunted that they cannot figure out how to let nine people pray for a couple of minutes without running into irreconcilable conflicts with the “reality of the manufacturing line” has no chance whatsoever of being able to solve real problems. A company with so little regard for the religious beliefs of its employees that it will not even try to solve the problem is too far from the requisite lean ‘respect for people principle’ to stand a chance.

Any HR managers and CEOs out there might want to jot this down: Your customers are under no legal obligation to buy from you. Your employees are under no legal obligation to suggest improvements. The government is under no legal obligation to provide you with any further funding for your factories. In fact no one has any legal obligation at all to keep you in business for one more day. When your business principles are built around attaining the minimum level of management necessary to fulill your legal obligations, you are doomed. If your HR folks spend much time at all worrying about legal obligations you have a gross failing of management on your hands.

Even worse is the track record of sheer stupidity the good ol’ boys at C.H. Robinson are putting together. Two dozen lawsuits for sex discrimination this year alone. The latest one alleges that, “Male employees gathered around computers to view Web sites with images of naked women. The assistant branch manager and another employee repeatedly sang a phrase referring to oral sex. In the course of doing her job of calling people to schedule freight loads, she was given fake names descriptive of sexual acts.” The notion of having ‘respect for people’ is so far removed from the thinking of people that would do this that lean is not the remotest possibility.

If there is a morsel of truth behind this, the C.H. Robinson Company cannot possibly be a world class logistics outfit. People who are so incredibly stupid as to let this sort of thing would go on cannot get freight from point A to point B with any sort of quality and reliability.

These companies do not need diversity training. Anyone who has not figured this out by 2006 is far beyond training. As comedian Ron White accurately points out, “You can’t fix stupid.” They should be fired on the spot - along with whoever hired such morons and anyone who ever gave them even a marginally good performance review - and that is only because public flogging is illegal.

The day an employee files a discrimination suit against your company that contains even a grain of merit is the day senior management should step back and take a long hard look at itself. Lean? World Class? Excellence? Those things are only pipe dreams for managers when such abominations could take place on their watch.

We’re frequently asked about how to begin and lead an enterprise-wide lean transformation. Below is an excerpt from an actual email (with names and company specifics removed) in reply to an inquiry by the president of a Fortune 500 company. She was newly appointed as the executive sponsor for her division’s “Lean Enterprise Transformation”, and asked us: “What’s critical for the success of our transformation?”

Our reply (part 1 of 6):

1. Make no little plans. If you do choose Lean Enterprise Transformation, choose it powerfully. There’s no room for ambiguity- don’t equivocate or delegate. As a senior executive and leader, make a strong high-profile decision: set breakthrough rather than incremental goals; assign your best resources; drive aggressive milestone dates; be open to outside help; and stay personally engaged. Your objectives should be well communicated, unequivocal, measurable, and have a time limit.

(Links to part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6)