By Kevin Meyer
Good article in the latest High Performance Manufacturing Consortium newsletter that maps some of President Eisenhower's quotes with lean concepts. The original full text is from Jon Miller at Gemba Panta Rei.
Dwight D. Eisenhower served as the 34th President of the United States of America, from 1953 to 1961. Eisenhower was a man of great insight gained through action. He knew war, and hated it. He knew hard work, and loved it. Here we share his timeless words of leadership which speak to us and even help us understand the lean philosophy.
1. "Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field."
In Japanese we say "genchi genbutsu" and in English "go see for yourself". The lean philosophy is based on management by fact, and the belief that facts exist where they are created, not far away from it. All
2. "Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all."
Push vs. pull. One of the challenges of lean management is to change our habits from pushing to pulling. In terms of production, pushing is making whatever is convenient or least problematic, rather than making just what the customer (next process) needs right now. In terms of leadership, push is topdown command-and-control while pull is motivating and teaching to create alignment of purpose.
Challenging fixed ideas and paradigms. These words speak to the importance of a culture that is open not only to improvements that are comfortable but also to challenges to the status quo. Too often it is the things or policies that we never adequately challenge that result in our downfall. We gradually become comfortable with a situation that at one time bothered us, or feel powerless to make a change, or we are attacked as disloyal for speaking the truth. It is the harder path, but we need to chip away even at these monuments that stand in the way of progress.
Andon. These words make sense from a lean point of view from two perspectives. First, a fundamental principle of lean management is to make problems visible. This may not require making a small problem bigger, only making it clearer or bringing it into focus. The andon system (andon = Japanese for lamp) allows team members to call attention to a problem so that the local support can arrive immediately to contain the problems. In fact most problems are bigger than they appear precisely because we are only seeing a small visible portion of the problem. We don't need to enlarge it if we can simply make it more visible. Second, taking a problem situation and enlarging it can be likened to creating the so-called burning platform – raising the sense of urgency to a critical level compels us to take action. Most of the time these big problems are already in front of us and we do not need to enlarge them in fact, but only in terms of importance within our minds.
11. "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
PDCA. Most plans don't go according to plan. Even the best plan created by the brightest minds does not survive contact with reality. So what we need is a strong and adaptive planning process. The PDCA cycle is a way of thinking, managing and improving what is central to the lean philosophy. When we plan, do, check and act over and over this is planning. We plan by going to the cornfield to see the actual condition and understand. We do by taking action. We check by going back to see the results for ourselves. We act by learning from success and failure to set the next plan of action. The quality of the resulting plans and actions are improved as we learn through PDCA.
Check out the full post at Gemba Panta Rei for all 13 quotes.