Day 269 – Lean Chops and Blind Faith

Mid 30's Lincoln V12 Victoria. Greyhound hood ornament detail. Lean to be sure, but not a product of lean manufacture.

          Danish philosopher and theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, once said, “Faith is a state of ultimate doubt.” At least he said something very like it. I heard it in college, and, as my attention at the time was mostly attuned to a plump, spooky co-ed named Pat Hillman, I’m not sure I got it exactly right. Now, when I want to know a little more about it and I want to be able to quote the quote with some authority, I find that I can’t find the quote. I find a lot of paraphrasing, which is okay, but I’d really like the quote for this piece, which is about lean manufacturing.

Kierkegaard had a lot to say about the relationship between faith and doubt, and whatever the point my professor was trying to make 40 some years ago, either about faith or about Kierkegaard, the quote, as I remember it, has stuck with me. I think there is a range of possible interpretations of the quote, from ‘faith is committing to something for which you have no objective proof’ to ‘faith and doubt exist in tension in the human soul.’ Somewhere in the middle is the idea that doubt ultimately defines faith. Without doubt there is no faith. There is instead certainty. Certainty does not require or inspire faith. Mark Twain’s spin on it: “Faith is believing something you know ain't true.”

          It is hard to be a believer—in anything. Belief is demanding. Knowing is not demanding. Knowing is just knowing. When someone wants to get up in your face about what you know, you just trot out your proofs and you are done.

Believers like to act as if they are certain. Certainty is held in high esteem by believers, and believers sometimes attempt to trot out what they believe are proofs. Mere knowers will call them on the scantiness of their proofs, and the believers will be undone. You can’t tart up proofs that don’t prove anything and expect anyone who wants to know to take them at face value. You can’t make proofs without legs attractive enough to get knowers to cheer for their undressing. The believers won’t know that they’ve been undone, of course, because they don’t really rely on proofs. They are believers. It’s when you are a believer but you think you might also like to know a little bit that believing becomes such a bitch.

          This brings us to lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing philosophy is a religion among its believers. Lean proponents want to adapt lean principles to everything. They keep expanding the Gemba—the place where stuff happens, the area to which one applies lean principles in order to make it lean. It used to be that the Gemba was the plant floor where things got made. Now we have the concept of the lean enterprise. The Gemba has grown like the blob in the movie of the same name, swallowing up territory as it expands. The Gemba now includes the offices—the place where, historically at least, stuff mostly does not happen.

I’m not sure this makes any sense. At its roots lean is about the elimination of waste. Lean wants all activities to add value. A place like an office, specifically a management office where nothing happens, does not add value. The natural inclination of lean is to eliminate offices. You only need to attend one Kaizen event to realize that this is true. When everyone is focused on the creation of value and the elimination of waste, everyone wants to get rid of the paperwork.

The record-keeping function does not add value. The record keepers and transaction recorders who get invited to these events find themselves trying to justify their existence. Kaizen events put a fear into them that they have not experienced before. They realize suddenly that they don’t do anything of value and they need to be eliminated. They will go to great lengths to concoct alleged proofs whose only purpose is to justify the existence of a certain amount of waste as necessary. That this often works is testament, not to the lucidity of the proofs, but rather to the obfuscation offered by the arcane and difficult terminology of the office environment. (We have accountants to thank for this. Luca Pacioli invented double-entry bookkeeping and included a treatise on it in his book, Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita, in 1494. Since then accountants everywhere have used ever more difficult terminology to make what they do seem magical.)

True lean believers want to extend the Gemba to their homes, their hobbies, their sports teams, and their government. I point this out because I would like to know a little more about how this is supposed to work before I start orchestrating Kaizen events around family meal preparation or cleaning the bathrooms. I don’t want to have to overcome a lot of sensible objections with scantily clad proofs about how much better my household is going to be for the implementation of a family-wide lean philosophy. I am not a believer.

          I have pretended to be a believer. I have even tried to be a believer. The fact is though, after three failed organization-wide lean initiatives, I want a little proof. I’d like to see lean work…just once. I’d be happy if it was just on the plant floor, the Gemba where stuff gets made. I’d like to see it work in the place for which lean was originally intended before I start trying to export lean principles willy-nilly to places where believers are in short supply and everyone, reasonably I think, expects some proof before they will follow you off the preserve.

          I know why lean failed at Albatross, twice. The first time it was because the change agent who got the initiative launched didn’t actually have any idea what he was doing. He didn’t know anything about lean beyond cleaning the place up and organizing the work spaces. This much had some impact to be sure. Common sense tells you that it would. Cleanliness is next to godliness. This is an easy faith to keep. However, 5-S (Sorting, Straightening, Shining, Standardizing, and Sustaining) does not make a lean initiative. It is a good idea but it is not sufficient to philosophy. It is not enough to get a truly lean result. When we stopped at the end of 5-S at Albatross because we didn’t know what else to do, we stopped lean. We didn’t see any results falling to the bottom line so we stopped 5-S as well. Lots of us wanted to be believers, but none of us wanted to make a messiah out of the idiot who got us started but couldn’t follow through. He didn’t have the lean chops. Hell, he couldn’t even access his own e-mail account without help from the people who reported to him.

          The second time lean failed at Albatross, it was because everyone was distracted by another initiative. Management launched strategic sourcing, and enlisted virtually everyone with any supervisory capacity into the project to justify the enormous consulting fees. They did this at the same time that they had actually handed over the lean process to someone who understood how it was supposed to work. The new lean champion was suddenly a lone voice crying out in the wilderness, and feasting on locusts and honey. Eventually this baptizer’s head was served up on a platter to someone’s secretarial Salome.

          Lean also failed at my last job. That one is more of a mystery to me. I thought they were going to get it right. They had focus and commitment across the board. They put incentives in place to get everyone, not just trained, but indoctrinated in lean principles. They had a schedule. They had truly high-caliber consultants to shepherd the process. Still the exercise fell on its face in the end. I think it’s because they started in the wrong place. (More on that tomorrow)

Day 133 - Concrete Finality

          U-Haul claims that a 4 bedroom house will fit into their 26 foot ‘super mover’ truck. I’m pretty sure that isn’t true, at least in my case, because it took me two trucks to move my 3 bedroom house into my 4 bedroom house. And then, after we were moved in, we had to buy more furniture to fill the left over empty rooms. Even so, I am only renting one truck this time because I fully intend to sell and give away a lot of my stuff before we move—hopefully enough of it to get the remainder into one truck for one trip. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

* * * * *

          Conditions started to deteriorate at Albatross after Betty Boop flew the coop. Many, many formerly cheerful staffers started feeling anxious and defeated, and with good reason. It was no secret that another substantial reduction in force was in the offing. Sales were shrinking as distributors and customers left over quality issues. Managing cash flow was a constant struggle.

Almost all of my time was now devoted to mollifying disgruntled suppliers who would not ship us product until we paid down our overdue accounts. Every day was a juggling act: whom to pay and how much, whom to beg, lie to, or ignore.

All the calls came to me. Rod made it clear that he was too important to be dealing with such matters. The clerks were too busy and too overwrought to deal with the calls effectively. Eddie was demonstrably too abrasive. That left slow walkin’, smooth talkin’ me to single-handedly keep the production lines moving through a carefully orchestrated medley of cajolery, assurances, promises, and deceits.

I did a masterful job of it too. Even Ringcomme complimented me for my success at keeping materials flowing without any money. Rod and Quentin were more reticent, but they did stay largely out of my hair, which I took to be tacit approval of my methods and abilities. Of course it could be that they were merely fearful that they would somehow be sucked into the gaping, dark maw of vendor troubles. I preferred to think of them as approving rather than fearful. At that point I would have grasped at anything to keep my sodden spirits afloat.

(An interesting aside: being able to deal effectively with irate vendors is an unusual, useful, and at times crucial skill. It is not one, however, that is likely to land a candidate on a short list of potential hires. Why? Because no hiring company in its right mind wants to admit that it has or is likely to develop a need for this skill, and no candidate who possesses it, as it is customarily developed under extreme duress, ever wants to take a job where he or she will have to use it again. It is, therefore, a skill that is just not discussed in polite company.)

After several months of this I was near collapse. I hadn’t seen the sun in a long time. I came into the office at 5:30 and didn’t leave until well after dark. I did my reports and analysis work before and after business hours. From 8:00 to 5:00 I was on the phone, fielding one call after another in a Herculean attempt to hold things together. The stress was unbelievable. My health, both mental and physical, began to suffer. I was on the verge of collapse.

That’s when Rod decided that we needed to hire an accounting manager. He put this on me too, like I didn’t have enough to do. It would have been nice if he was trying to get me some help, trying to take some of the pressure off so I could be more effective, but I think his real goal was to replace me. He wanted me to solicit, interview, and select someone to take over my job so he could get rid of me. He didn’t tell me this of course. What he told me is that I needed to be doing less work and more management. He envisioned my ultimate role, or so he said, as purely supervisory—much like his.

I settled on a candidate we’ll call Dennis Lustre, who came with pretty good experience and excellent references, although he had not been working in accounting for a number of years. Dennis was just a few years younger than me, divorced with grown children, very personable and eager. I liked him immediately although I worried that his penchant for gab was going to be problematic. The man loved to talk.

It took forever to get Dennis hired, principally because I couldn’t get Rod or Quentin to give me a firm decision. I wasn’t going to be fooled again into making an offer that I later had to rescind because those two bozos wanted to indulge their timidity at my expense. Three full weeks after I had decided on Dennis I got a signed personnel requisition from Quentin—the requisite documentary proof that I was not a rogue operator. Marjorie delivered it.

In spite of Rod’s vision for the new office dynamic, the one that had me adopting a purely supervisory role and Dennis assuming my accounting functions, I had a different idea. We weren’t ready for Rod’s vision. We had way too much other crap going on to try to settle into anything resembling planned functionality.

For one thing we had two sets of consultants working full time in two large conference rooms to upset whatever internal vision we tried to implement. The consultants worked for our owners, who consisted, since our last reorganization, the one that had resulted in the untimely demise of our former UK based parent, of a consortium of banks and creditors. The consortium could agree on nothing except that there needed to be some wholesale changes to return us to profitability, and that, apparently, they needed to pay exorbitant sums of money to a bunch of slick New York consultants to decide exactly what changes needed to be made. That they were using the very money we could have been paying to our vendors didn’t seem to bother anyone but me.

I determined to put Dennis in charge of the payables section, and to let him start fielding some of the irate vendor calls—this in spite of the fact that Rod wanted him to put together a book of monthly account reconciliations for the auditors and to start writing a policies and procedures manual. Neither of those things made a lot of sense to me under the circumstances. Dennis didn’t know anything about our accounts or our systems. He would have taken forever to learn enough to do account reconciliations. On the other hand, given his gift for conversation, Dennis should be a natural at the cajolery and subterfuge we were practicing on our suppliers.

As far as the policies and procedures were concerned, Quentin and Rod’s collective ability to render effective decisions on simple matters like hiring an accountant didn’t bode well for publishing a manual within the decade. By the time they were ready to issue a policies and procedures manual the consultants would have so changed the organization of our business as to render the manual obsolete and useless.

Dennis was in fact a natural at dealing with the vendors. He was also sensitive and charming enough to resurrect the flagging morale in the payables section. Of course, as far as the AP clerks were concerned, even Attila the Hun would have been a huge improvement over the management style of Eddie Sharpe.

          All of this lifted a huge burden off my shoulders, and I was able, finally, to drive past the several bridge abutments on the way to and from work without dreaming wistfully of switching off the air bags in my car and swerving into a concrete finality. Meanwhile, of course, the consultants were plodding on to another kind of finality—one that would take the bridge abutments out of play forever.