I receive the occasional e-mail announcing new "Lenses" (semi-structured web pages) from the fine folk at Squidoo from time to time, and bit on the hook tonight.
Seth Godin (marketing guru, has had a nice run of 7 books, and seems to just burst with ideas that sprout as soon as they hit the soil) is the man behind Squidoo, and so I rapidly latched onto one of his Lenses (anyone can author these, it's a nice platform, feature rich, and easy to use - different than a blog, but Web 2.0 in look and feel) and stumbled back onto his blog...
The most recent entry was titled "In praise of a blank page" - which is a great eye-catcher/attention-getter, as at least for me, it spawned thinking about tying the fear of blank pages into the mind killer that it can be for idea generators, painters, musicians, writers, etc.. But no, he's talking about a friend's book cover that seems was so inappropriate (mediocre) that leaving it blank would've been a better approach. I could easily see that happening...
But what REALLY caught my eye - his riff on refusing to ship/create unworthy products. He's been discussing making remarkable products, services, etc. for years now, and there is plenty of life left there - but the final paragraph is what got me, as it takes me back to one of the most interesting podcast interviews I've done so far, with Matthew E. May at Aevitas, and discussing his book titled "The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation."
Seth discusses kanban, which in a Japanese car factory, gave workers permission to stop the entire assembly line to fix a problem, no matter how big or small. The counterintuitive piece there is that in giving that power to any worker to push the big red button that grinds everything to a halt, production doesn't drop through the floor (overall) as you might expect, but that quality goes up, process times shrink, workers feel more empowered, and improvements pile on top of each other so subtly that no one notices (particularly outside the company) how much improvement has piled up until WHAM, it looks like INNOVATION (Big I) from the outside, and people wonder what happened.
Correction! (on Friday, April 6)
Just received word from Matthew E. May - updating me live from a plane before the "all cells off" call, who was TXT MSGD by a friend (I'd guess Ralph Bernstein, at Productivity Press - as Seth has made the correction now as well) about this post...
Seems both I (definitely) and Seth (yep) confused the terminology here. It should be Andon, not Kanban that we're talking about.
I'll drop in the correction here, straight from Matthew:
Kanban is something Toyota borrowed from the US grocery industry. It's a request. It means "sign card." It's what makes Just In Time work. Grocery markets and bakeries need fresh produce and run on a JIT basis. Toyota saw how it worked in the 50s and used it. It's a customer request essentially. When you go to the store and see the "Out of stock, Time to reorder" card...that's a kanban. In a Toyota plant no work is performed until the Kanban is empty and calls for it. It's a pull system.
Andon refers to stopping when there's a problem and dates back to Sakichi Toyoda's quest to build a loom that would automatically stop when a thread broke. Whenever something goes wrong you pull the andon cord. In newer plants now it's a Dell flatscreen that goes to a team leader's BlackBerry. But the line doesn't stop. Unless the problem can't be fixed by the next station. It's a call for help. You never want to stop the line if possible. It works like the stop cord on a bus. The bus stops at the next stop, or safest spot if it's an emergency. The andon is pulled thousands of times a shift...but line rarely stops. Heck, there's a Camry coming off the line every 57 seconds!
So... sorry about that folks, slight (ok, large - or larger than I'd like at any rate - the dangers of blogging at midnight) mixup in the terminology here, but the underling point remains the same, planned or unplanned disruptions will happen in your business, quickly responding and adapting is the key. Allowing and encouraging workers to acknowledge and fix problems as they happen (within the stop points Matthew describes above), constantly, always, is the way to keep the system and it's output not just running in the short-term, but continuously improving over the long-term as well. Always much to learn here - and I'm certainly not a Lean expert!
And now that the correction has been made, if you are interested in Lean Thinking, and need some definitions to grab onto, you may want to grab a copy of LeanSpeak (available as ebook or hardcopy - Seth would be so proud!). There is also of course the Lean Enterprise Institute, across the river from me in Cambridge, MA, which has quite the collection of Lean books, training, seminars, workshops, a thriving community, and more!
Thanks Seth, for bringing me back to those concepts, and raising them once more, in your classic attention getting style, and Matthew, thanks again for doing the interview with me (and supplying the correction!). Great conversation, and a great, easy to understand book. We could all use more of both.
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