James created a survey for users of Lean and/or Six Sigma. It takes 5-10 minutes to complete and it is completely anonymous. Please participate yourself and also pass on to colleagues, contacts or friends who are active members of the Lean and/or Six Sigma community.   I appreciate your help;  please follow the link below: 

http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/sea/LSS

Lean and Green, the wave of the future.  And that’s the way I see it.  Adam Zak

With each passing day, recruiting and retaining the right executive talent to lead Lean & Six Sigma efforts and Green & Sustainability initiatives poses a greater challenge…

Today’s most experienced Lean leaders hail from those industrial sectors which were pioneers in continuous improvement.  As still greater numbers of companies venture into lean and Six Sigma, the demand for this expertise is beginning to outweigh overall supply. So where and how do we seek out the best of these individuals?  

On the other hand, the challenge in recruiting the right Green leaders is different, but no less daunting. Can we even agree about what makes an executive Green? How do we deal with imprecise definitions and varying skill sets?  How can we focus on targets which are moving due to the evolving nature of executive backgrounds?

In both situations you’re hiring change agents, quite often the executives who will outline a new vision for your company, and then inspire your team to make that vision a reality.  So what does it take to recruit the right Lean & Green executives for your organization?

In this special report from Adam Zak, a top executive recruiter of Lean, Operational Excellence and Sustainability leaders, you’ll quickly learn:

• The key principles and goals underlying lean, Six Sigma and green and why these are important to business success.
• How to identify and differentiate among the various stages through which companies ascend on both their lean and green journeys.
• How to then determine where your own organization currently stands on these two ladders – and evaluate the lean and green status of the companies from which you want to recruit.
• How to identify the common characteristics among the lean and green leaders who really stand out from the crowd—the qualities they bring to the table to deliver impact for their companies, and
• FIVE KEY STRATEGIES you must understand in order to attract and retain the best-in-class Lean and Green Leaders
• FOUR ideas you can implement TODAY to make your own recruiting processes more lean and green… 

To receive your complimentary copy of this timely special report, please email Adam Zak with:  your name, title, company company phone number and business email address  zak@LeanRecruiter.com

http://leaninsider.productivitypress.com/2009/06/lean-jobs-think-green.html

Developing a strategy that focuses on global sustainability can ensure future productivity and strong consumer confidence – but only if companies do it right. As we move forward into an increasingly interconnected world, companies that have chosen to operate with LEAN & GREEN (sustainable) practices will begin to break ahead of the less innovative. How do you decide where to dedicate your resources to achieve the most return, economically and environmentally, in the future?

The Executives’ Club of Chicago is sponsoring a half-day conference at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago.  The program begins with a 7:30 breakfast and networking session and runs through lunch, and should conclude around 2:00 PM.  The conference focus is sustainability and I expect to hear quite a lot of information about the connections between GREEN and LEAN.   Contact the Executives’ Club directly for registration, or download the program invitation by clicking on the link below.    As a long-time supporter of the Executives’ Club and frequent participant in their outstanding programs, I encourage you to consider attending. 

“Business Sustainability in a World in Crisis”  

Here is just a small sampling of lead  articles from our previous issues of LeanConnections.   Please link below to read. You should be able to easily print each article with just about any browser you’re using (will upload a WP plugin soon that removes sidebars before printing – thanks for your patience on this).  

Adam Zak

• Time to Retain, Time to Engage
• Lean Executives Fast-Track Transition to Green
• Nothing Adds Value to Lean Like Respect for People

(Read full article from our October, 2008 edition of LeanConnections.)

by Adam Zak

The recent launch of IBM’s “Green Sigma” Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) consulting service underscores a growing realization that operational excellence principles and practices can offer much in the way of direction to the rapid acceleration toward Green business. More and more business leaders agree that the shift to Green is necessary and, when done well, can be profitable, and that Lean, Lean Six Sigma, and other Continuous Improvement strategies can be applied to integrated management systems as a framework for the shift to Green.  

Lean-trained executives already bring the experience, vision and discipline necessary to fast-track transition and real cultural change for companies driving their own Green revolution. The need for a new breed of executive — frequently called the Chief Sustainability Officer or CSO — who can harmonize the transition to Green, is rising at companies large and small. Most of these firms have some sort of business excellence or continuous improvement initiative already in place but find the CSO’s role expanding and evolving to merge production, risk management, compliance, marketing, and social responsibility to impact the entire enterprise. As reported in recruiting newsletter The Executive Grapevine (March 6, 2008), “Recruiting for high-level jobs is more difficult than filling the gap of technical skills and scientific talent.” Executives with expertise in Lean continuous improvement systems bring hands-on experience gained from a decade or more of development at some of the world’s most successful companies including Toyota, Danaher, United Technologies, Johnson Controls, Whirlpool and others. 

In Consulting Magazine on April 29, 2008, George Pohle, vice president and global leader of the Business Strategy Consulting Practice at IBM, said two-thirds of business executives view sustainability as a growth opportunity as opposed to it being about regulatory compliance or philanthropy. Welcome news, for sure.  

Today, Green Is No More A Fad Then Lean Was A Decade Ago.

Like Lean, Green can embrace the concept that reducing consumption and preventing waste is more efficient and effective than subsequent mitigation. Global Lean leaders have seen first-hand how continuous improvement across the value stream can capture competitive advantage. Lean’s focus on reducing input cost, waste, and risk; promoting line-level innovation and professional development; and building proactive EHS strategy mirror the triple bottom line impact Green seeks to generate. Add marketing and social responsibility to the mix and the result is a Lean + Green management strategy that brings PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) principles that many “Green-only” transition managers often don’t realize they’re missing.

Green Transition Does Not Come With A Playbook As Yet. Lean Does.

Lean systems deliver Green outcomes not simply by replacing legacy factors with lower-carbon or recyclable inputs, but by preventing unnecessary inputs and procedures altogether. Instead of reducing waste, Lean (done right, of course) prevents waste in the first place. Our new generation Green executives will have to look beyond engineering and the supply chain to find creative ways to keep cost from entering the value stream at all. Lean + Green provides an analytical tool that can help reveal unexpected cost exposure.

Lean Unifies Green Transition

Viewed from the bottom up, Lean is the culture driver often overlooked when Green is implemented by trial and error – a unifying program that makes transition consistent across traditional operational silos while maximizing return on the most productive yet expensive  input of all, human resource. Learning from shop floor (Gemba) experience has long been a prized component of Lean-Sigma-operational excellence programs and coincides perfectly with the social responsibility image that made Green desirable in the first place. And in cases where sustainable materials are still cost-prohibitive compared with legacy inputs, simply striving for Green result can deliver value as employees feel they’re contributing to an evolving, improving process and outcome.

Lean systems have long realized the return from an engaged, well-trained, innovative workforce. By coordinating diverse production stages and management systems into a successful, enthusiastic, corporate culture, the vision and discipline of Lean-embracing executives transfer perfectly in Green transition. Lean provides a two-way channel, from the top down and then back up again, that fast tracks transition and reflects the foundational flow underlying Lean systems.          

Next Steps – Next Innovations

So what are the next steps for implementing Green in your service, manufacturing or intellectual product enterprises, and what are the next innovations evolving from Green transitions across industries? The leaders are revisiting the operational excellence initiatives that focused on input and process efficiency before Green became a growing concern.

• Traced back through Toyota’s explosive growth in the 1980s to Henry Ford, the architect of mass production efficiency, Lean systems provide a unified, tested structure for competitive modern innovators
• Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) members are synthesizing a formal Lean + Green strategy and that program will transfer beyond manufacturing. “Growing evidence, spurred by case studies, academic research, and government programs, shows that by combining lean and green practices, companies can potentially save millions of dollars a year…” (Oracle Information InDepth 2007).
• More and more keynotes, conference presenters and authors are demonstrating ways Lean + Green can create synergy in every industry cluster.
• A unifying thread is emerging: Starting at the C-suite level with Lean-trained executive talent is critical in getting the most out of Green transition. The new generation of Green leadership will recruit CSOs who can maximize operational excellence with the structure and discipline learned from Lean.

Ultimately engineers, site managers and line level team members will implement Green transition on the shop floor, R&D lab and corporate office, but out-Greening the competition is going to require more. Transition without unifying vision simply transfers waste from carbon byproducts to wasted talent, enterprise, and potential.

Darrell Rigby, head of Bain & Company’s Global Retail Practice advised in Consulting Magazine’s April 29, 2008 edition, “Almost always the answer is to eliminate waste. It’s always a good payback and usually has the best return on investment for firms.”

Take a lesson from the largest consulting firm in the world. If IBM is fielding a venture that specializes in economics of conservation analysis and CSR, and that firm drives Lean operational excellence throughout its own management structure (actually practicing what it preaches), this truly underscores the premise voiced here: Lean is Green, and the two are almost synonymous. Except that one is an outcome and the other is the means to achieving it.

CO2 - BAD!

We fly less. How? We’ve developed some interviewing ideas and techniques which allow us to more effectively evaluate and assess candidate interests, qualifications and cultural fit via telephone and Webcam (think Skype). We’ve been able to reduce the amount of air travel to candidate interviews by 25% in each of the past two years. We still do face-to-face interviews, of course, but only with top finalists for your executive search. Less travel, less cost, faster search cycle time. Oh, and when we do fly, paperless ticketing is the rule.

Candidates travel less.  We invite finalists to visit us at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, scheduling multiple interviews on one target date whenever possible. Candidates never leave the airport (no rental cars, no ground transportation – dollars saved, reduced emissions, and no missed return flights).

We pioneered the use of fuel-efficient hybrid cars for our transportation services. 

We provide personal recycle bins for employees. Our kitchen supplies – everything from cutlery and plates to cleaning supplies – are eco-friendly.We are in the process of substituting eco-friendly alternatives in our office supplies as well. 

About paper. We preview and final edit on-screen. When we do print, we use recycled paper. We  print double-sided. Our toner cartridges are remanufactured. We’ve eliminated all office copiers – we  scan, transmit and store documents electronically for instant retrieval, then recycle them. No file  folders or cabinets (less office floor space required-smaller footprint),reduced energy requirements  (those printers and copiers sure use a lot of juice) and no time wasted filing and unfiling stuff. 

How’s that for Lean+Green!