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Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale, by Employee X
Ebook Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale, by Employee X
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There’s a lot of pain going down in American business these days, and much of it is coming down on the heads of American workers. Surprisingly much of it is caused by corporate witlessness rather than wickedness. Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale chronicles two years of lean-driven turbulence at the author’s employer of 15 years. Lean, the management methodology which started in the 1950s in the manufacturing environment of Toyota, has slowly but surely been making its way into the office environments of the Western world. But not without controversy. The book pivots off the question of why lean thrives when it appears to turn people off almost as quickly as it turns them on. Beyond that, it is a statement from what lean practitioners call “the factory floor,” where the view is not as simple, sunny, or salutary as it may appear from the boardrooms, executive suites, or various lean think tanks. It is that most critical assembly line statement that lean advocates themselves give loud, long lip service to. It is this: Stop the line! There’s something wrong here.
- Sales Rank: #2972668 in Books
- Published on: 2013-08-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .49" w x 6.00" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 216 pages
About the Author
Employee X has been a writer and editor in corporate America for most of his professional life. He worked for a Fortune 500 company where the long-whispered rumor in the corridors was that the company had once hired an arsonist to torch the hotel where their chief competitors were holding a conference, sending all its upper management up in smoke. He worked for another company where the founder and president was shot and paralyzed outside the courthouse where he was on trial for pornography. And then there was the company where one of the in-house mad scientists took an experimental laser ray up to a hillside overlooking a major metropolitan area to conduct an unauthorized, unsupervised, unbelievable field test. Yet for all that, Employee X doesn’t think he’s ever quite seen anything like a company at the top of its industry with a 22 kt. gold reputation turning the keys of its kingdom over to a cadre of consultants from an outside consultancy firm to conduct a “lean transformation.” You had to see it to believe it. Employee X saw it, and here he chronicles much of what happened before his disbelieving eyes.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A business book with conviction and passion for the 21st Century
By Judy Clay
Mr. X's "Cautionary Tale" is incredibly relevant in today's business world, more so than 25 years ago.
The first thing that attracts you is the book cover. You can't judge a book by its cover? Not this time. The first time I saw this I was quite taken aback by its originality and its intent. This book is made to shake you from your slumber of management flavors of the month. If you have perused Business sections in bookstores or online you are well aware how boring business books are when it comes to attracting your attention. Bland, no matter the subject matter and designed by what appears to be a standard software package, "Look...." is by no means that. It also doesn't fall into the category of yellow and black tones with titles such as "Exhaling for Dummies", either. This cover grabs you from the throat. This will not be a pretty ride.
The author is incredibly talented and has the credentials to back up his devotion to his craft. He knows what the business world is like and uses his gifts in the forms of Fairy Tales heading each chapter to make his argument for a better system for employees and management.
In an attempt to trace the history of management techniques throughout the past hundred years, X. does a fine and accurate job. Allow me to condense his points, just a bit:
Early-mid 20th century: if it ain't broke, don't fix it
Later 20th century: if it ain't broke, make it better
Early-mid 21st century: If it ain't broke, we'll break it, we'll destroy the village to save it and you can pay us lots of money to do so
The first two eras were driven by being better, faster, stronger, especially in the manufacturing arena and was adopted by the service industry. The third era is based on fear. The world economy took a nose dive in 2008 and we are still seeing the ramifications, on a global basis and if we can survive and/or thrive during this time. X. argues quite convincingly that we won't if we use Lean and only Lean.
X makes a strong point that he has no problem with the concepts of Lean. His issue is with the company hired to implement their practices. X takes us on a journey that if you have ever worked for a profit/non-profit, manufacturing/service/ governmental industry, you will be nodding your head in agreement or shuddering at your experience when `management' decides to make a change without the inclusion of its entire staff.
I've been there. I have seen its principles work and fail completely. In fact Lean `brags' that 90% of businesses that attempt Lean fail. X asks why anyone would want to embrace that type of system.
X takes our hand and guides us through the many mistakes, miscues, and downright incompetence that can break a company. There are many, many lessons to be learned. The most important from a pragmatic and also an ethical standpoint is all employees must be engaged and listened to and respected for their concerns during any managerial change.
X is not naïve and knows that in today's climate employee/company loyalty is a concept of the past. More importantly, X does not let a company off the hook because we have generational changes. In fact, he makes the point that we must listen to all if we are going to be successful in whatever work we do. This is where management has consistently dropped the ball when striving for improvement. "Make it so" is a terrific line from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but this is no TV show and not listening (you don't have to agree or implement) to your staff, the experts, the ones doing the actual work will throw additional barriers and challenges at us when we are struggling for resources.
I'll leave you with your decision on whether Lean is worth it. Read the book. Decide for yourself. Invest in this. Your future and the future of our economy depend upon it.
Where do we go from here? I'm making sure I listen to X and his "Cautionary Tale"
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Great Book! Sad tale of America's business woes...
By Bruce A. MacLaren
Look Before You Lean did such a faithful job of re-creating a corporate organizational setting, I found it a little off-putting. I left that setting more than 10 years ago, and though I was fortunate to be employed mostly in small corporate settings (all of them, save one, with the same intelligent, down-to-earth CEO), since then I’ve only had cause to wonder why I didn’t leave it much sooner. Look before you Lean was a quick and easy trip to a past I had no desire to re-visit.
The reason I’ve come to feel that way is that in many organizational settings there is a fundamental disrespect for many of the people that make the organization work. Whether it’s blatant or subtle, it is a common characteristic of many companies, especially larger ones. (Whenever I heard that a company’s most important asset was its people, I gagged and ran as far away as I could.) Over and over, that disrespect was described beautifully in Employee X.'s book. In fact, while I recognize and hold in high regard the even handedness and analytically objective discussion of that disrespect, I kept wanting to interrupt the flow of the narrative with the phrase that WTF was short for.
In my view, in addition to the disrespect the book makes clear, there is also an abdication of responsibility by those charged with making the whole thing work. Instead of delving into the bowels of the organization, and the many key people with some wisdom about what works and doesn’t work, and grappling with all the difficulties and uncertainty attending that exploration, it is a common practice to bring in the outside consultants for them to facilitate “the tough decisions.” As this book points out so ably, what can possibly result from such disrespect and abdication except some level of organizational chaos and demoralization, and unsustainability? I watched it up close more than once.
Employee X has given us an even handed and precise analysis of what, all too commonly, goes wrong in organizations attempting to get better.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A Business Book Which, Sadly, Applies To Schools As Well
By Arthur S. Pease
I just finished Look Before You Lean and really enjoyed it! Actually, not really enjoyed - the stupidity chronicled there is so frustrating to read about! There are way too many comparisons to my years at XHS. Luckily, we didn't have any real push for the types of 'transformation' experienced in the book until my last years and I'm afraid are continuing.
In particular, the workspace redesign, the lack of open-ness to real questioning, and the attitude that veteran workers are automatically the problem are so common in my educational experience. We never had it at XHS but so many new schools were built w\o walls and then spent the next 20 years finding ways to put up sort-of walls and in some cases real walls. Did they ever really ask teachers???
As I got to know more and more teachers from around the state and region, I began to realize how lucky I was to be in X, under Y Z as Supt. S\he was someone a lowly teacher could disagree with, even in open School Board and School District Meetings w\o hearing a word of complaint. In not many places could I have been as vocal as I was at XHS.
I also hope that I, as a young'un, was never so sure that any older teacher was automatically wrong and was to be ignored! This became the standard with one principal, and more frustrating because s\he denied it. Another principal did not make much effort to deny 'my way or the highway'.
One example of how the best principal I ever worked for dealt with an issue - and how different from what was experienced in Look Before You Lean:
In the mid 90's, when block-scheduling was all the rage, we began to look at the issue: we read articles, listened to a folks from a couple of schools who had changed, made quite a few visits to other schools, and had several department and faculty meeting discussions. On the first of two end-of-school days,the principal told us that after the year's study and discussion, he thought we were ready for a block schedule and would be implementing one the next fall. After that meeting, at least two or three of us went to him [individually, w\o the other's knowledge] and explained why we felt that the school as a whole was not ready. The next day, the principal said that he had not understood the depth of concern and that he was changing his decision to proceed. I know few folks who would have had the testicles to make such a change. [We never did go to block scheduling, for a variety of reasons.]
As I noted above, the business situation described on Look Before You Lean is too much like too many schools, so could be a useful book to read before the next 'transformative idea' comes down the pike!
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