Corporate Anorexia : Author Darrell Mann

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) January 6, 2011 -- I spend a fairly large proportion of my time these days feeling embarrassed to be British. Trying to get home before Christmas to find that the biggest airport in the country was ‘closed’, leaving tens of thousands of people stranded probably didn’t help my mood. Watching the news over the Christmas period didn’t help much either. It seems like wherever I look our systems don’t work anymore.

(Figure 1: Failing (British) Systems In The News please see: http://www.globalblackswan.com/articles/corporate-anorexia)

Or rather, they don’t when something out of the ordinary happens. Like a large amount of snow falls in a short space of time, or the ambient temperature stays below ambient for a long period of time. But, hold on a minute, didn’t we used to be able to cope with such things? 30 centimetres of snow might have closed Heathrow for a few hours in the past, but suddenly travelers are expected to endure five days of ‘flight cancelled’? People have found themselves with no water for a few hours following a freezing spell, but (as in Northern Ireland right now) surely not for over a week?

I believe that all of these instances are symptomatic not of a bit of extreme weather (Helsinki airport has been closed due to weather for approximately 3 hours in the last twenty years), but of something rather more sinister. My hypothesis? Lean.

Not Lean as it was originally conceived, however, but rather the crude bastardisation of the original thinking that has occurred in a rather large proportion of organizations.

Like a lot of things, some very smart initial thinking often gets diluted to the point where the smart thinking ceases to be smart any more. The big idea underpinning Lean is ‘waste is bad and so should be eliminated’. A statement that few would argue with. Indeed it is a statement that has passed through ‘common sense’ to become accepted dogma. It would take a very brave person inside any organisation these days to argue against adopting Lean principles.

But let’s have a look at what we actually mean when we say ‘waste’. Depending on which author you’re reading, there are a host of different ways and means of classifying the different types of waste. Figure 2 lists 15 types of waste as may be collated when looking across all of the different classification methods.

* waste – process, business (employees, managers suppliers, etc), pure
* waste of over-production
* waste of waiting
* waste of transporting

* waste of inappropriate processing (using a hammer to crack a nut)
* waste of unnecessary inventory
* waste of unnecessary motions
* waste of defects
* waste of untapped human potential (empowerment)
* waste of inappropriate systems (over-specified computers, machines, etc)
* waste of energy and water
* wasted materials
* service and office wastes (excess meetings, food, photocopying, etc)
* waste of customer time
* waste of defecting customers

(Figure 2: Different Types Of ‘Waste’)

Now, an important question. Take a couple of minutes. Which one is the odd one out from Figure 2: Different Types Of ‘Waste’?

Found it?

Probably not.

Before revealing the answer, let’s take a moment to work out why the question is a difficult one: Like a lot of ‘improvement’ initiatives inside organizations, the initial big idea has to be communicated from the Board down the food chain so that everyone understands what is trying to be achieved. The moment we get below CEO level, however, and people are immediately forced to look through the list at those things they are able to do something about. Inevitably, someone working in the HR department, or on the shop-floor of a production line, or cleaning the desks at night is able to do something about a relatively small proportion of the available menu. Everyone below CEO in fact can only do something about a proportion of the total list.

And which is the one that almost no-one has any direct control over (probably including the CEO)?

Answer: the last one in the list - "waste of defecting customers".

All the others are very tangible, measurable wastes. Wastes that people have the authority to do something about within their silo of the business. But ‘defecting customers’ has nothing to do with what happens inside either your silo or indeed inside the organization. A defecting customer is a waste that occurs outside the system. It is therefore a difficult one for anyone to do anything about…

…and as a consequence, it usually gets left off the list (in fact, in many organizations, it never makes it onto the list in the first place). And the moment that happens, the original philosophy has been corrupted and the organization is well on the way to the sort of failure shown in Figure 1.

To read the rest of this article please go to: http://www.globalblackswan.com/articles/corporate-anorexia

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