In his article Jim refers to Pareto’s (Mr. 80/20 rule) second concept of economic optimality, and immediatly reminds me of this phrase in the Hippocratic Corpus: “first do no harm.” Some lean practitioners attempting to drive change unfortunately ignore this admonition at their own peril.

If, in our zeal to improve something, we cannot envision how our ideal future state may negatively impact another part of the organization’s currently “adequate” state, then we are indeed not optimizing the whole. Rather, we fall back on the silo-thinking which created the need for making changes/improvements in the first place.  And that’s where true “Lean Leadership” in the executive ranks shows what it’s made of.  Go forth, ye, and make sustainable Lean happen! 

And that’s the way I see it.  Adam Zak

Director, Product Quality in  high-tech consumer electronics, for the creator of one of the hottest consumer electronic devices of the century (yes, this one), based in Silicon Valley, California  

Why You Want this Position

•  You crave the excitement of working with the visionary team which created the hottest consumer electronics gadget of the century. And, there’s more to come! 
• You are obsessed with excellence and quality. This company is already attaining a level of world-class quality metrics that other consumer electronics makers would die for. Your mission: take your passion for quality and make it even better!
• You thrive in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial start-up environment where your daily decisions make a direct, clearly visible impact on the operational and financial performance of the company. You relentlessly pursue your personal and professional expectations for performance and results.
• You hunger for meaningful work with an exceptionally talented team, where it’s all about clear and open communication, genuine collaboration, and exceeding customer expectations  - across the whole business, delivering lasting customer satisfaction.

Introduction  -  Our client creates highly engaging and innovative consumer-centric electronic product solutions. The business has grown rapidly in size, scale and scope but still retains, at heart, the start-up mentality which has fueled its wild success. Because of this outsized growth rate our client needs to scal-up the systems, process and procedures (and their functional leadership) so vital to support the company’s continued advancement into new products and global markets.  Hence this new position, Director, Product Quality. 

The position will be based in the Silicon Valley, California metro area and will report remotely to the company’s Vice President, Global Supply Chain, who is based in Hong Kong.  All product design, development and support functions are performed in California, while manufacturing is currently done on a contract basis in Shenzhen, China. Our client is the wholly-owned subsidiary of highly successful and profitable Fortune 500 parent company, which is also located on the West Coast. 

The Role  -  Define, lead and take ownership of the product quality organization.  Develop world-class quality thinking and the programs, systems, principles and processes through which quality manifests itself throughout the company.  The results of this effort will be threefold:  exceed customer expectations in every way; reduce total warranty costs across all product lines, and; build the culture and supporting structures to ensure continuous improvement in both.

 What Your Bring to the Table

• You have demonstrated both deep-dive, hands-on experience in shop-floor quality problem solving, and 30k-foot strategic-level quality issues perspective and sophistication.
• You have demonstrated the ability to rapidly and scientifically assess and deal with day-to-day quality correction, while simultaneously anticipating, developing and implementing the quality philosophies, infrastructure, and practices critical to the company’s future success.
• You offer a proven track record driving operational excellence and continuous improvement initiatives, focused on product quality, utilizing Lean Manufacturing (Toyota Production System) and Six Sigma methodologies.
• You have outstanding communications skills.  This enables you to interact with senior management executives and influence their decision-making, as well as to effectively partner with other exceptionally talented people broadly across the organization.
• You have recently worked in a high-volume 3C (computer, communication, consumer), fast-moving product lifecycle  electronics organization and have extensive on-the-ground experience in mainland China.
•  Chances are your resume will include the names of other word-class consumer electronics companies such as Apple, Palm, Philips, Sony, Nintendo, Nokia, Cisco and more.

Travel  – Because even the best video communications technology has its limitations, the Director, Product Quality should expect to travel frequently, at times on very short notice, to China.

 Compensation  -  Excellent base salary, sign-on bonus and restricted stock units (RSUs).  Equity awards consist of stock in our client’s parent company and are historically a major, continuing preferred form of executive compensation.

 Connect with Us  -  Please connect with me in whatever way is most convenient for you. We share no information about you with anyone outside our firm until we’ve agreed on this with you.

 Adam Zak, Principal  +1 (847) 304-5301

resume@LeanRecruiter.com      az@LeanRecruiter.com 

http://Twittter.com/LeanThinker    http://LeanRecruiter.com

“Two different articles both appearing yesterday and discussing obliquely-similar industries got me to wondering about business models and commitment to those models.  How long should an organization stay committed to a model?  When should it change?  What should trigger change?  The meat of the articles is nothing new and simply part of a long-term trend, but the data supporting the trend was just updated.”

“If you stay true to your beliefs and your passion, is it enough?” Kevin asks midway through his post…

Kevin, my sense is that beliefs and passion should not be confused with business models. Beliefs and passion are the source of the values (not as in “customer value”) which we as individuals have come to hold.

The business model, on the other hand, is how we think and execute during the process of serving customers and stakeholders, while at the same time upholding those values. Yes, it is critical that these values somehow manifest themselves in the business model, but they are only a small part of the total picture.

I agree that no business can succeed in the long-run without strong beliefs and passion, but the business model itself must evolve and transform over time. Toyota started out by making and selling weaving looms; Honda began with motorized two-wheeled vehicles; I’ve had to reinvent my own executive recruiting practice three times during the 15+ years I’ve been doing this.

So news organizations, just as every other company, should constantly reinvent to stay competitive in their market place. That’s not betraying beliefs and passions; it’s staying true to them by continually figuring out how to deliver ever more exceptional customer value.

Let’s hope they figure out their new future state in the market sooner rather than later. Long live the Lean Manufacturing (now Lean Management) business model.

“Have you been confronted by a Black Belt recently? Unless you are into martial arts then this has most likely happened at work when you have been hit by a Lean Six Sigma (6S) initiative (or possibly operative if you got in the way). I am using 6S here to encompass both the Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma concepts, particularly as many organisations tend to use a hybrid of the two. What started off as a way for manufacturers to actual work out how to build something that didn’t disintegrate/explode/maim unexpectedly as soon as the punter got the product home (or in the case of British Leyland before you got home), has turned into a quasi-religious movement that comes with its own zealots and sacred texts”.  

More chuckles as you read the full text of John’s post here…

Extraordinary times call on us to look again to the core of the Toyota revolution and how we can make it our own

Strange things happen in a crisis. Consider, for example, that some companies, in retrenchment mode, are cutting back on investments that not too long ago they were eager to make in learning and implementing the principles of the Toyota Production System. At least part of the market for improvement seems to be shrinking, in other words, at precisely the moment when just about everything in the marketplace seems to need improvement.

This is more than just strange. After all, Toyota’s management system was forged as a response to severe economic hardship, its basic mindset tempered by the threat of catastrophe. Circumstances have changed over the years, of course, but the Toyota system has proven to offer a potent and strikingly reliable way to survive-and even thrive-against fierce competition, in hard times as well as good. Its signal strengths – relentless cost cutting, commitment to people and dedication to long-term vision – are made for crisis.

Clearly the message is not lost on some businesses, where leaders are intensifying their focus on learning lean. But other companies remain a puzzlement. Why, when they stand to profit from it most, are some retreating from efforts to reap the benefits of the Toyota revolution? 

One reason may be that, over the years, we have allowed ourselves to misconstrue Toyota’s achievement and how we might best absorb and extend it. Despite our best intentions, we have sometimes treated it as we vowed we never would: as a commodity, a set of “tools” or techniques, a “program.” We have bought and sold it in the form of workshops and how-to books, training regimens, acronyms, certificates and prizes. No matter how sophisticated our grasp of lean’s deep roots, we have nonetheless been willing to shape it to the market’s eagerness for surefire recipes, delegable formulas and instant gratification. We have busied ourselves with superficialities and too often found convenient distractions from the hard work of criticizing ourselves, nurturing others and contributing to society. 

Criticizing, nurturing, contributing-these are not empty words. They lie at the explicit heart of what Toyota’s leaders have been striving to achieve all along. 

Rebranded as “lean” by Jim Womack and Dan Jones, Toyota’s approach to management is notoriously difficult to define, a dynamic infrastructure, at once straightforward and complex, of shared convictions, principles and practices. In order to make lean intelligible (and, some might say, marketable), proselytizers variously explain it in terms of structures (e.g., houses, pyramids), procedures (“First do this, then do that….”) or “tools” (5S programs, kanban, OEE, value stream maps, A3s, etc). All reasonable enough on the face of it. 

But something seems to be missing. While none of these elements is foreign to lean, it seems fair, especially in the current context of economic upheaval, to ask whether some of our representations of lean might not be fragmented or rootless. Do the parts – like the parts of the blind men’s elephant – somehow obscure the whole? Have we neglected common principles and key unifying forces underpinning lean’s success, forces such as commitments to internal and external communities, near-obsessive quality consciousness, relentless diligence or even, tellingly, the motivating fear of failure? 

Questions such as these take us back to a deeper lean, a lean in which techniques are inextricably bound to underlying principles and convictions -  principles of Takt, Flow and Pull, to be sure - but also the conviction, for example, that current methods are deeply inadequate, that enduring commitment to people is essential, and that true competitive strength relies on strategic coherence between everyday workplace decisions and long-range aspirations to collective betterment. 

That such things are difficult to talk about and difficult to package doesn’t authorize us to ignore them. Especially not now. Indeed, this is a crucial time to rededicate ourselves to such basics, not merely because they provide an extraordinarily sound basis for cost cutting in the short term – which they assuredly do – but because they lie at the core of building competitive strength for the long term. 

There is more, too. Lean’s animating convictions and principles turn out to be directly relevant to what appear more and more to be fundamental shifts in marketplace values.

Evolving Values

Consider one example of lean’s connections to the changing nature of value. 

Communications technologies and recent political trends are bringing ever more transparency to the relationship between private and public interests. As this happens, social considerations increasingly enter into the calculations of profit-making enterprises. Businesses are taking greater account of the impact of their behavior on the greater community, the well being of their employees, the health and safety of consumers, the overall energy supply and even the sustainability of the natural environment. As costs increasingly attach to private use of the commons, for example, it is becoming harder to see any advantage in fouling the nest. Social responsibility is newly respectable. 

This trend is already underway in at least two forms. On the one hand, many businesses must increasingly prepare for public scrutiny and regulation of their activities.  On the other hand, positive social contributions are looking more and more like useful selling points. Wal-Mart’s embrace of energy-efficient light bulbs, the flowering of the renewable energy industry and Honda’s quest to improve bystander safety are small signs of this evolution in values. It is not tangential that the president of the United States wants to see American automakers build more energy-efficient vehicles. 

And lean’s role? It turns out that lean’s defining preoccupations – with relentless waste reduction, with nurturing people and with strategic coherence-provide powerful models for cutting - edge thinking and practice in this changing landscape. Examples abound, from the extension of healthcare improvements beyond industrial notions of heightened efficiency, to manufacturing’s emerging recognition that pollution and wasted energy are forms of muda, to new insights on how service industries can meet evolving standards of customer privacy. The opportunities for improvement are rich and potentially enriching. To see them, however, we need to stop thinking of lean as a toolbox and start recognizing its true breadth and depth. 

Learning Lean

How can we most effectively tap into this “deep” lean? 

There are undoubtedly some aspects of effective lean leadership that depend on knowledge; others are expressed by how we reorganize processes and structures. Intertwined with all of these and of far more consequence than any, however, are deeper lean attributes, shared in the community but rooted in each individual: distinctive sensitivities, values, perspectives, convictions, habits, attitudes and reflexes. Even for accomplished leaders, developing these qualities – developing a robust lean “mindset” – requires time, persistence and guided engagement with the workplace in all its chaotic intricacy. This implacable fact applies, indeed, to everyone, because the lean ideal envisions an organization in which all can and do contribute their capacities for improvement. It stimulates the intellect to learn about lean’s “DNA,” but nothing actually changes until we learn how to replicate that DNA through practice. 

For individuals, as for organizations, learning lean beyond its superficial aspects is less like acquiring tools than it is like knowing how and if and when to use them. One doesn’t become a virtuoso pianist, after all, by buying a piano or attending workshops or reading books. Such activities may have supplemental value, but the core of acquiring mastery lies in disciplined practice. Practice, practice, practice. It lies in taking action and making mistakes and thereby learning to hear and see subtle distinctions that others don’t. It lies in developing new reflexes and in pursuing perfection. To borrow the language of the old joke, there are two ways to get to Carnegie Hall, but only one of them will get you on stage.

Pursuing the metaphor of musicianship a bit further can be helpful. Great musicians – even good musicians – are invariably nurtured by good teachers. This is as true of orchestra or ensemble players as it is for soloists. One can find similar examples with little difficulty: athletes and their coaches, soldiers and their trainers or doctors and their mentors. Self-taught virtuosos in lean, in any case, are rare enough that you wouldn’t want your organization’s success to have to depend on your being able to hire them. 

This truth about learning should recall to students of lean the importance of wisely guided practice and application of lean’s core values. It also underscores a challenge for conscientious lean teachers (who are likely, by the way, to shun boastful labels such as “guru” and “sensei“). The challenge is this: history shows that lean, like music, is most reliably taught through forms of coaching or mentoring. Numerous complementary activities may be valuable and can and should be exploited, but the essential reflexes and convictions that make superior lean leaders – and lean organizations – are best developed though guided, disciplined practice and experience. That good coaching may be difficult to scale, market or commodify is irrelevant or at least of secondary importance to the central fact of its effectiveness. Yes, there are subtleties and complexities to be reckoned with, especially when one considers the needs of transforming large organizations. The basic lesson, though, is pretty straightforward: If you’re serious about getting better at lean, get a coach. If you’re serious about teaching lean, be a coach. 

Moving Forward 

Toyota, facing the same difficult times as everyone else, shows no signs of giving up on the Toyota Way. That hard times prompt some other organizations to retreat from their commitment to lean indicates, perhaps more than anything else, the degree to which we – students and teachers alike – have allowed ourselves to be distracted from the powerful convictions, principles and practices at the heart of the revolution. This is an exciting time for lean, but only, paradoxically, when we return to the basics and only when we remember to apprentice our ambitions to sustained and disciplined practice.

Andrew Dillon, an independent management consultant, is a long-time observer and participant in the lean revolution. In the 1980s he served as Shigeo Shingo’s interpreter in the United States and translated many seminal works on lean. He works in English, French, Japanese and Chinese. He can be reached via apdillon@att.net.

Since 1987, Adam Zak Executive Search has provided specialized and experienced lean executive recruiting services.  We bring clients highly qualified senior level executives ready to hit the ground running, implementing and leading your lean operational and management processes.

Adam Zak has delivered exceptional operating executive talent to a diverse range of Fortune 1000, private equity portfolio and entrepreneurial companies in both North  America and abroad. We’ve enjoyed working within virtually every industry – from the automotive and aerospace giants putting into place their version of the Toyota Production System, to fast-paced consumer product distributors revolutionizing their supply chain management practices – with our approach to Lean Executive Search.

Our client base today includes many well-regarded global names, the result of Adam Zak’s more than two decades of personal commitment, dedication and proven results to earn our valued reputation. We continue the same service standards to this day, partnering with each client, fostering trust, earning respect and remaining fully engaged until the perfect pairing has been made. Adam Zak, Lean Executive Search.

We’ve studied lean change agents to understand where and how they acquired their skills. We’ve analyzed their working environments, along with the circumstances under which they’ve succeeded or failed – and the reasons why.

Most importantly, we’ve learned what effective lean change agents really do to create an impact in and on their organizations – beyond manufacturing and operations. Adam Zak Executive Search helps build a lean corporate culture from the source – its top leadership team.

Contact us today at 847-304-5301 to learn how we can help grow and improve your organization.   

Adam Zak – Lean Executive Search.