No magic potion fueled my journey from dead-last runner in eighth grade to competitive college athlete. My progress was incremental, with setbacks due to injury, to overtraining, and to undertraining. But during the course of those nine years, I studied and learned how to train and race better. I became a student of the sport—and of my own body. By the end of my career, I was not just a better athlete, but a smarter athlete.
The organizational journey from mediocre to outstanding—from flabby to fit—is similar. You need to study the way your organizational processes function on the macro level, and how individual jobs are done on the micro level. You’ll have to become a student of your own company so that you can build better processes as well as more capable people.
At this point, you may be disappointed that I haven’t provided any specific tools for you to use in this journey. You might also feel that the ideas I’ve presented are too vague to implement quickly and easily. You’re right.
That was by design.
The truth is that tools won’t make your organization fit any more than a new pair of track spikes would have made me fast. Don’t get me wrong—I loved buying new racing spikes, but they didn’t make any difference on the stopwatch (sadly). The past 25 years have provided ample evidence that tools alone are insufficient. You can look up how to make a heijunka board; you can read a book on setting up a kanban system; you can hire a consultant to set up manufacturing cells; and in the end, you’ll join the very long list of companies that attempted to copy Toyota’s tools and ended up mired in mediocrity. There is a place for tools, of course, but they’re useless unless they’re deployed in an environment that honors the fundamental principles I’ve described in this book.
Implementing these principles will set you on the road to organizational fitness. And as with personal fitness, the biggest obstacle is likely to be … you. Your own well-established habits and preferences, your likes and dislikes, your own inertia will be a challenge to overcome. Getting out of bed at 5 a.m. in the middle of winter for a swim workout or an eight-mile run isn’t easy, and neither is coaching a frontline worker through yet another problem-solving session when you’d rather just tell him what to do.
Culture’s no excuse, either. Yes, you’ll undoubtedly face some resistance to the changes you want to make. However, it’s likely that the resistance is largely due to fear from past experiences with command-and-control leaders or the cynicism of dealing with managerial “flavor of the month” initiatives. That resistance will dissipate when people hear the sincerity of your words and witness the commitment of your actions. Think about the excitement of the nurse manager who said, “When I realized that improvement was about saving time, making our work easier, and improving patient care, I realized that I had a lot of ideas after all!” Or imagine the powerful feeling of shared destiny at FastCap, where Paul Akers spends time on the production line stuffing parts in bags and the three people on that line came up with a better improvement than he did. Cultural resistance fades quickly in an environment where process improvement and employee development are built into the fabric of daily work. Those reactions are a major part of the joy of building and leading a fit organization.
Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a five-person organization that doesn’t even subscribe to Fortune, you can embark on this fitness program. It’s simple (if not easy), and progress will be slow. But the financial, intellectual, and emotional rewards make it a journey worth taking.
W. Edwards Deming said, “Survival is optional. No one has to change.” He was right, of course, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be a long slog through the muck under enemy fire. It can be a path filled with challenge and even, as Menlo Innovations shows, joy.