Earlier this week I spent two days in a renovated old milking barn with a couple dozen improvement professionals from healthcare, government, higher education, and a handful of well-known consultants. We were focused around the problem of improving improvement education, particularly in California. I'll have much more about this summit in a few weeks.
One of our major topics became the "branding problem" of improvement, in particular lean. You can't teach people who won't sign up. A major reason they are hesitant to get engaged is they see such problems as a risk to their jobs and livelihoods. They see improved efficiency leading to headcount reductions.
It's hard to argue with that when just one day after our summit there's the following headline in The New York Times:
Uber Cuts 10% of Employees in Sweeping Reorganization. The layoffs affect about 3,300 workers as Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi bets on a "leaner organization."
Well, for once it's not AI. But "lean"? He didn't mean lean in the true improvement sense, just as a smaller, more agile, organization. But the damage was done.
Uber wasn't alone this year. Coinbase cut roughly 700 people in May, about 14% of the company, with Brian Armstrong telling staff he was rebuilding it to be "lean, fast, and AI-native". Three weeks later Wix cut around 1,000, close to a fifth of its workforce, with Avishai Abrahami writing that the company had to become "faster, leaner, and flatter". That's three headlines in one year teaching several million people what one of our favorite improvement terms isn't supposed to mean.
Uber's stock rose nearly 2% on the news. The same sentence gets read as good news by the market and as a threat by the people who have to execute it, and plenty of readers are both at once. We're asking those people to bring their best thinking to a program whose vocabulary just moved their investments up and their job security down in the same paragraph.
I've spent 30 years making the opposite argument. Improvement removes waste, waste removal frees capacity and creates value for the customer in terms of lead times and service. Capacity converts into growth if leadership can sell it. The people who freed the capacity are the ones who go fill it. I believe that and have done it.
John Krafcik coined "lean production" in a Fall 1988 Sloan Management Review article out of MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program, and he picked the word because Toyota's plants used less of everything: less inventory, less floor space, fewer engineering hours, repair areas so small you could miss them. Accurate description. Terrible brand. We named a method after the thing that gets smaller, and then spent 38 years surprised that executives read it as a headcount reduction tool. Even "improvement" carries a whiff of it, though a milder one, since improvement at least leaves open the question of what improves.
Krafcik's finding wasn't about inventory levels at all. He looked for a link between plant performance and country of location and found one between performance and management philosophy, which meant respect for the people doing the work and a system built to surface their problems rather than bury them. Respect for people, or human nature as Jon Miller interprets it, sits at the center of this discipline.
The pitch to someone deciding whether to engage has to be specific about what they get. Less bureaucracy between them and a decision. More control over how their own work is designed, an actual say in changing it, and a company positioned to grow into the capacity they created rather than bank it. The strongest programs I've seen back that with a formal no-layoff commitment. That will give even the strongest, most forward-thinking CEOs and CFOs the jeebies, which is also why it's rare. Committing to it means a leadership team giving up its fastest lever in a bad quarter. Committing and not sticking to it will destroy trust in a flash.
Somebody at the summit proposed fixing this at the level of vocabulary. Focus on the term "improvement." Reinforce the concept of amplify instead of optimize. I like that, but the credibility gap didn't just open up over a bad noun, it evolved over decades of abuse.
If you're the person on the line who watched four coworkers leave after the last improvement event, what would we have to actually do before you'd raise your hand for the next one?