LEAN: Less Employees Are Needed?

I was with a client who insisted on using their lean implementation to reduce headcount. Obviously not a good association to have with the rollout of lean, and one day a person wrote on their team visual display board, underneath a large lettered LEAN tag, Less Employees Are Needed.

A fellow lean consultant stood nearby and said to the employee “You Think?” I thought that was pretty harsh. Unfortunately I did not have the quickness of mind to state right away what I could have – that in fact “Lotsa Thinking Employees Are Needed,” but the incident stuck with me. I finally realized that LEAN is a much more apt acronym (at least than what it was originally named for), and that it really stands for Learning Employees Are Needed.

As you begin and continue to use systems management to manage your organization, be cognizant of the associations you produce along the way. There is absolutely no need to ever associate Lean with anything bad – just the opposite in fact. It’s a win-win-win all the way around.

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About Jim

I am the founder of the Lean Expert Academy and a previous partner in the Lean Leadership Institute with Jeff Liker (The Toyota Way), Paul Akers (2 Second Lean) and Norm Bodek (Productivity Press Founder). We train Lean consultants to implement the exact same methodology and techniques that you can learn here. I will be releasing my first book, Lean 2.0: How to Dominate Your Industry Using Lea(R)n Thinking very soon.

I believe the days of suboptimal results of command & control management models will be replaced within this decade, and you are a driver in that transition. I believe that we are at the tipping point of a new era, an era where everything that has the name “management” attached to it, will be done with Lean thinking and Lean management.

I know for a fact, after years of being deep in the trenches of making change happen, that implementing Lean is not that hard to do. It’s actually quite easy if you follow the right steps, and my course shows you exactly how to achieve that outcome.

My goal and mission is to produce as many excellent Lean thinking leaders as possible – to arm you with the ability to recreate what I and my team of consultants have been doing consistently for many years. If you are serious about seeing Lean spread more quickly, please join me.

  
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