Strategies of TPS/Lean Implementation

Abstract

Without a functioning CI culture continuous improvement just does not happen. Other than that of Toyota all the rest of the transformation philosophies are structurally ill-devised, inflicted with a people management mentality that cannot by definition anchor CI in the pervasive cultural fact of the organisation. A few lessons stand out. (1) The meagre reproducibility of kaizen companies pushed (rather than led) by powerful managers to better and better results can remind us that outside their original context some solutions may not work just as conveniently. The allure of Lean must be limited for most CEO’s if they hear only about the disruption that it creates and the hard work that it demands from the whole organisation. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Lean has been configured in the right way at all to be able to serve improvement purposes in the Western context. (2) In semi-controlled Lean cultures walking a slightly different path the main carrier of the critical phase, i.e., a leadership-mentored evolution of systemic CI capabilities where leadership meets system and tech/process-level CI practice, is simply not on top of the agenda. (3) In other instances centred on technology leadership we detect at best a fragmented CI capability. Rational calculation however does speak against a dazzling commitment to systemic Lean anyway.