From the Editor

Welcome to the Lean CEO newsletter!

The featured article is Sustaining, Leadership, and Why? The featured book this month is The Outstanding Organization by our good friend Karen Martin.

Gemba Academy is running a promotion this month offering all 115 of the LeanPresentations.com training presentations, as well as the Lean Enterprise Strategy Kit, for free. More info.

There are several great conferences coming up in just a couple months - the Lean Accounting Summit in September and the AME Annual Conference in October. Register soon!

- Kevin Meyer

Featured Article

Sustaining, Leadership, and Why?

By Kevin Meyer

A good friend of mine recently sent me a photo of what his team found while cleaning one of their production areas:

Yes, that's a certificate lauding completion of various 5S activities... except the last one: sustain.  And from the mess in the background you can see what happened.

Sustaining improvement - lean or otherwise - is difficult.  How many of us are on a diet... again?  Needing to clean the garage... again?  In fact, sorting and straightening and all that is really the easy part.  Doing it day after day is tough.

Three sources of the difficulty come to mind.  The first is the lack of a plan to sustain the improvement.  How often will it be done?  How will it be monitored?  5S is often sustained through audits and daily checklists, even after it becomes ingrained in expectation and even culture.

But such plans are meaningless if there isn't also leadership commitment.  Are managers and supervisors holding themselves and others accountable to the sustaining plan?  What happens when the plan isn't followed?

However ultimately there won't be leadership commitment if there isn't a solid understanding of why the improvement program is happening in the first place.  I've seen innumerable organizations, including mine, go down the path of "we must do this or that program"... without understanding why.  I even know of one organization that I won't identify (cough... mine... cough) that once long ago had a goal to implement two lean tools per year.  We learned our lesson.  What is the problem or opportunity, what is the desired future state, and what is the best tool or program to achieve that future state?

To sustain an improvement program you need a solid plan.  For that plan to be effective you need leadership commitment.  For there to be leadership commitment there needs to be a solid reason and understanding of why the improvement is needed - and important - in the first place.  The power of Why.

Read entire article | More Lean CEO articles

Featured Book

The Outstanding Organization

By Karen Martin

After two decades in the trenches of helping companies design and build better, more efficient operations, Karen Martin has pinpointed why performance improvement programs usually fail: Chaos, the sneaky but powerful force that frustrates customers, keeps business leaders awake at night, and saps company morale. In The Outstanding Organization, Karen offers a toolbox for combating chaos by creating the organizational conditions that will allow your improvement efforts to return greater gains. Proven, practical, and surprisingly simple, Karen's system focuses on four key behaviors for organizational excellence--Clarity, Focus, Discipline, Engagement--that, once instilled into a company's DNA, open the door to sustainable growth and profit.

More information | More books

Featured Video

Gemba Academy has just released an twelve video module video training course on Kanban.

This course is part of Gemba Academy's Complete Lean Package, which now has over 250 video modules and is used by over 1,000 companies worldwide. More information.

Key Upcoming Events

Upcoming events that must be on your calendar:

	Lean Accounting Summit Orlando, Florida 12-14 September 2012 The Lean Accounting Summit has featured the biggest names in lean and lean accounting. Womack, Rother, Hoseus, Koegninsaker, Bodek, Byrne, Cunningham, Maskell, Fiume, Solomon. These are many of the pioneers of lean thinking.
	AME Annual Conference Chicago, Illinois 15-19 October 2012 The Association for Manufacturing Excellence hosts the world's largest lean conference, for practitioners by practitioners. Workshops, serminars, and tours of factories and other lean facilities.

Lean CEO maintains a comprehensive list of hundreds of upcoming events and workshops.

Full Lean CEO Events Calendar

Evolving Excellence Blog

Join over 10,000 readers who get their daily dose of blunt manufacturing and business reality by subscribing to the Evolving Excellence blog!

or Subscribe to Evolving Excellence by Email

Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:

• Dr. Deming I Know Your Pain - It's not just the Chinese that are competing with North American companies.
• Sorry IndustryWeek, Apple is Not a "Manufacturer" - Apple tops IW's Best Manufacturing Companies list - but they aren't a manufacturer and they aren't best.
• Take Another Path - Sometimes you have to change direction to succeed.
• Sustaining, Leadership, and Why - Sustaining an improvement program requires a solid understanding of "why?"
• Apple's Average Traditional Supply Chain - Apple executes a traditional supply chain fairly well. Period.
• My Favorite Founder - The prescient Alexander Hamilton.
• Let's Call the Whole Thing Off - When will we address the true reasons behind health care costs?
• Lots of Stuff Going On - A roundup of some lean stories in the news.
• The Management Myth - Management starts with a blank sheet of paper.
• Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Welders - More problems with Sloan.

Forum Discussions

The 10,000 members of the Lean CEO LinkedIn Group are discussing a variety of topics including:

• Strategic planning and tactical execution.
• Dumping China for America.
• The best is the enemy of the good.
• Manufacturing Moneyball.
• Do you think it matters what workers are called?
• Why do companies find change so difficult?

Lean News

Lean-oriented news stories from the past month.

• What's the Secret to Success? (Modern Machine Shop)
• Making the Leap to Consultant (IndustryWeek)
• Why Does Kaizen Endure? (ManufacturingDigital)
• The Future of Lean and Six Sigma (Manufacturing.net)
• Nurseries Go Lean to Save Time (Capital Press)
• Lean Healthcare Reduces Cost (Healthcare Finance News)
• How Toyota Uses Kaizen (Business Today)
• Making the Future (The Economist)
• Turn Lean to See Waste (Times of Malta)
• How to Get Hospitals to Think Lean (Hospital Review)