Interview: Did We Get the Result We Expected to Get, and If Not, Why
I was recently interviewed by Bill Fox of 5 Minutes to Process Improvement Success™. His interview entitled Did We Get the Result We Expected to Get, and If Not, Why with Jamie Flinchbaugh has been posted. Bill was great to work with, and read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean in great detail in preparing forr our discussion. Here is an excerpt:
Bill: Another topic I wanted to explore with you was leadership. You talk a lot about leadership in your book. Why is leadership so critical to a lean transformation?
Jamie: In some sense you could say that leadership is critical to anything. In some ways it’s an easy lever to say it’s important, but I think why it’s so important to lean is that we believe the effect of lean is based on how people think; it’s based on behaviors.
The second reason is, it really is all-inclusive. The effect of lean engages the whole organization; it casts a very wide net. It’s not isolated to a few super problem solvers. It really turns everybody into a problem solver. If you take those two factors together and say we’re trying to engage everybody and we’re trying to do it at the behavioral level, well I’m going to need leadership to overcome those kinds of challenges. Simple program management and training is not going to be enough. I think those characteristics about lean are what makes leadership so essential in the lean journey.
You can read the entire post here.