Article-Jet

I read an old newspaper account of three tragic deaths. Two men and a youth (Arnold Dobson, Harold Most and his son Harold, Jr.) perished in the blasting summer heat of Death Valley in California. Sheriff deputies found the bodies at seven, fourteen and seventeen miles from their abandoned car. In leaving their stranded car to seek help, the three had headed in the wrong direction going towards a ranch house they had passed thirty miles back. Just a mile in the other direction was a grove of willow trees and a spring.

“Grass-roots change presents senior managers with a paradox: directing a ‘nondirective’ change process. The most effective senior managers in our study recognized their limited power to mandate corporate renewal from the top. Instead, they defined their roles as creating a climate for change, then spreading the lessons of both successes and failures. Put another way, they specified the general direction in which the company should move without insisting on the specific solutions.” — Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat, and Bert Spector, Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change

Have you heard of Lean Healthcare? I am sure many of you have and that quite a
few haven’t. The concept of lean healthcare has been adopted from manufacturers.
The idea of lean manufacturing and lean service are most visibly displayed by
Toyota Motor Corporation. Toyota has so refined and developed the techniques
that organizations around the world are using their ideas to improve their own
organization and are benchmarking against Toyota.

LEADING CHANGE

The momentum of change continues to build. If you or the organization you work with is not prepared for ongoing change then you risk the possibility of being overwhelmed and left for dead by the Superhighway of life! This dramatic metaphor is reported constantly by the predictors of business and economic trends. With technology and Globalization of trade driving these trends, we must learn to adapt, gracefully, to this change or be playing the very difficult role of catch-up.

When it comes to Lean Manufacturing and in particular Six Sigma we can all see how it applies to high volume, low product mix production. However for a Production Manager like myself who operates in a low volume environment where we sometimes have multiple machine change-overs in the same shift and products which are only ever manufactured once in their current configuration it can be a challenging environment.

Poor managerial performance is viewed more as structural rather than market factors. The mantra of the managements for increasing efficiencies and profitability is more often than not structural adjustments within the organization.

In today’s business world, conflicts are inevitable, but they don’t have to be costly or time-consuming. If you manage people or projects, chances are that a majority of your day is spent resolving conflicts, settling disputes, or solving problems for other people. You may get to the point where you ask, “How am I supposed to get my job done when I am constantly putting out fires.”

Since the beginning of business, various methods for operating and developing the business have been identified and refined. These have evolved into the conventional methods that we use today. We improve management and effect business change by adding new conventional methods on the existing methods in place.

A leader’s role

In any change project, a leader must wear many hats, however his/her role can be split into two key areas:

1. Set the strategic direction of the change and;

2. Convince everyone of its importance.

Have you ever been on a nonprofit committee and half way through a very important project someone dismisses them selves from the committee because they have other prior business engagements or they have other time constraints, which do not fit with the committee.