Lean in any language

I'm struck by something I read in Lean Retail (Simon G Fauser, 2007).Describing the difference between Lean Management and Kaizen (Japanese continuous improvement), the author explains that the differences reflect differences in social organisation in the Western and Japanese cultures. The West values individual contribution; in Japan the inidividual is sublimated to the group.

In the early 1990's, I attended a week-long Kaizen event at a manufacturing plant in East Texas. The event was hosted by a US consulting firm, and they had invited former Toyota Production managers to lead Kaizen teams. It was a fascinating experience, not least because I was able to witness the explosive culture clash between the East Texas plant managers and the Japanese consultants. (By Thursday, the plant manager was bravely attempting to defuse the situation and prevent a mass walk-out by line managers and supervisors.) On the sidelines, it appeared to me that the plant's real issue was the wholesale dismantling and replacement of their processes by outsiders. They experienced huge changes (and equally impressive gains, by the way) with no appreciation by these outsiders that what was ripped out represented the cumulative contribution of those managers and supervisors over long periods of time. The fact that some of the outsiders were from a different culture became the touchpoint. No doubt the consulting style of the Japanese was quite different from that of the US consultants -- who were much less direct, and more considerate communicators. But xenophobia played no small part in the scapegoating; it was convenient for externalizing the frustration and hurt feelings that arose out of the project. As we left the site at the end of the week, the plant staff were threatening darkly that they intended to undo all of the Kaizen work, which would have resulted in significant financial loss to the company.

However, I couldn't see that the process methodology, or how we went about performing Kaizen, or the decisions made, were influenced by culture. In fact, that's what I liked about the process: it was data-driven and completely logical. An experiment conducted in Tokyo looks the same if it's replicated in Tucson. I found this refreshing, since most business management practices are completely culture-dependant. The challenge in any business process is how to make it work with multiple people (it's not a process if everyone does his own thing). It has to be quantifiable; it has to be replicable regardless the individuals who perform it. That's the crux: you must create a mechanistic process that is manifested only within a social, human context. Values and social norms inform only one aspect of Lean or Kaizen: gaining buy-in necessary for a successful implementation.

For engineers and anlysts, that's always the rub. I like my chances of getting a machine to run a new sequence smoothly better than getting a team to do the same.