Understanding Resistance to Lean Adoption in Corporate Structures

In this new series, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss five major management and productivity myths and how Lean and Deming thinking solve them. This first episode offers an overview and Jacob shares his journey from traditional management to a better way.

Jacob Stoller is the author of The Lean CEO: Leading the Way to World-Class Excellence and Productivity Reimagined: Shattering Performance Myths to Achieve Sustainable Growth.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'll be talking with Jacob Stoller, who is a journalist and Shingo prize-winning author of The Lean CEO, which provides a boardroom perspective of Lean initiatives. Now, he connected with Dr. Deming's criticism of command and control management and recently wrote Productivity Reimagined to explore the reasons why organizations fail to apply the Lean and Deming style of management at the enterprise level. Jacob, welcome to the show.

0:00:37.8 Jacob Stoller: Well, thank you, Andrew. It's great to be here.

0:00:40.5 AS: Yeah it was actually really fun to talk to you before we even turned on the recorder to kind of really help people understand where you come from and why you are here. So maybe you can just explain a little bit of your journey of how you got to this point in relation to Deming.

0:00:58.2 JS: Okay, well, interestingly, I started out in sales. I was a corporate sales rep selling services and software and all that kind of high-tech stuff. And I did that for quite a while. But what I liked best about corporate sales was the dialogue that I had with customers, being able to talk to people and ask questions and explore topics. So fortunately, I was able to turn that into a career. I left that profession about 2001 and became a writer, journalist, did research projects, gave talks, did some training, did all the things I wanted to do. And through that, I discovered Lean by accident. And that, I think, wasn't probably till about 2010. And I was writing for a magazine, and someone told me to write about this Lean thing. What is it? And I started to ask questions and talk to people and eventually discovered this wonderful way of running companies. I was totally impressed, not just with how efficient they were and all that, but how they treated people. I thought, this is, boy, I would have liked to have worked at some of these companies.

0:02:14.6 AS: And for someone who's never even heard, let's just imagine someone's never heard the word Lean. What does that mean anyway? And what did it mean when you first saw it and after you really became an expert in it? What does it mean to you now?

0:02:28.4 JS: Well, I thought it was going to be super high tech. That's what I first thought. As a matter of fact, when I went to Japan to actually see it firsthand, I was expecting just flashing screens and everything. And of course, it was a very different thing. It was a lot of people, very, very people-oriented environment, people talking to each other, lots of communication. So I thought, wow. And I started to learn that it was really all about people. And so that was a gradual transformation for me. But it was very rewarding to see the human side of this. So that led me, really led me to some writing. I started working with some lean organizations like the Kaizen Institute, and I started doing writing for them, writing newsletters. I also wrote, helped Misaki Yumi the late Misaki Yumi, a very well-known Lean promoter, write the new edition of his latest book. And I did all the case studies for that. And I also helped various other initiatives. But the main thing was that I decided to write my own book, and that was The Lean CEO.

0:03:57.2 JS: And what I was interested in at the time was I saw that people doing Lean were running into all this resistance, and I was interested in exploring that a little more. And I thought, well, the people that really understand that will be the CEOs because they'll been there. They've been in the boardroom discussions. So that's how The Lean CEO came to be. And in that process, I was asking questions about management and the various practices. Now, I was expecting that there would be a sort of a standard executive playbook for Lean. That was my hypothesis, I guess. And it would have been really nice, very, very easy to write the book and neat and tidy and all that, but it didn't work out that way. They were all different. They all had different ideas. And interestingly, a lot of the thinking that went into their work, actually, they had learned before they even discovered Lean. That had been stuff that they believed in. They learned about teamwork early on, so they were somehow predisposed towards the people side of Lean. So I was really fascinated by that. But my conclusion really was that there was no one way to implement Lean, that there were just many, many different variations on it.

0:05:20.5 JS: And that's when I became and started to discover that there was a lot of the thinking that made these people successful at leading Lean outside of the Lean community. And that's where I started to get interested in some other. How the tech sector was handling change, how the sustainability people doing sustainability projects were handling change. And one speaker that spoke out loud and clearly to me was Dr. Deming, because Dr. Deming understood the fundamentals behind the thinking. I think that makes Lean successful. He understood what was wrong with conventional management and the barriers that people were running into. So, Andrew, I don't know if you remember, but the 1980s, everybody was talking about this ABC show, If Japan Can, Why Can't We? And here we are looking at a productivity crisis. I mean the US was their crown jewels in the US industry had been trounced by the Japanese. They were being outproduced two to one, right? I mean, and so this was recognized as a crisis. It was an election issue at the time. And I, they got Dr. Deming on television and they asked him what are we doing wrong? And Deming was very clear.

0:06:51.1 JS: He said you're not going to learn this, you're not going to be able to imitate the Japanese, and you're not going to learn a few production tricks. You've got to fundamentally change the way you manage. So that was a very, very strong message that I picked up when I was writing that book. And what's wrong with conventional management? What's wrong with command and control management? And why does it not why does it create companies that are so wasteful and do such a bad job at being productive?

0:07:22.6 AS: And as a devil's advocate, if I think about a Lean a company that's trying to adopt Lean, what I would assume was that at the management level, the objective of management is really to reduce resources, to reduce, if you could reduce the cost of electricity, your profit margin would go up. If you could reduce the raw materials that you have in your production process, your profits would go up, as an example, and the value of your business would go up. So how could there be any resistance to a young engineer that's picked up Lean and is bringing it through the organization? It's a little bit odd to think why would there be resistance to that?

0:08:04.1 JS: Well, the resistance is that people are used to doing what they're doing, for one thing. And Dr. Deming has identified with his knowledge of complex adaptive systems a fatal flaw in the hierarchical structures that corporations are run by. You see, if you're using corporate logic, you assume that every department and every work group is like an independent component and that if each component functions as intended and according to measured objectives, then the corporation will succeed. And Deming said that that is completely false, and he had the evidence to prove that. So what people are resisting is not that, people aren't resisting the idea of reducing costs and being efficient, but they're measuring efficiency in the wrong way. They're measuring efficiency of independent assets. And they say if these independent components produce efficiently, then the sum of the total will have an efficient corporation. But that's not true. That's only true according to 17th century logic. If you follow Newton and Newton's laws, that seems to be the case. And it's intuitively, we do tend to think that way. But if you're running a company, a company is not a simple system. It's a complex adaptive system.

0:09:38.7 JS: And it's the interdependence of all these entities and all these components that determine the success of your company. And that's what Deming was trying to teach, and that's what people didn't want to hear.

0:09:50.7 AS: So if I hear you correctly, the first thing is kind of the first wall that someone would come to at the board level or at the management level is just trying to overcome inertia. This is the way we do things. Why do we need to change? It takes effort to change. And then the second thing you're talking about is the lack of systems thinking, thinking that if we could just optimize every part, we're going to get the optimal output of this system. They didn't understand that, as you said, it's a complex adaptive system, that it's much more difficult than just saying, everybody do your best. Is there any other resistance that you saw? So the inertia is number one that I saw. The second one is a lack of systems thinking. Is there any other things that you discovered as you were working on The Lean CEO?

0:10:38.3 JS: Oh, yeah. Well, there's the elephant in the room. And this is that most large corporations anyway are focused on short-term shareholder value. Right. And the way to make your short-term numbers is not to be productive. It's not to invest in good long-term strategies to develop a long-term competitive advantage. It's to make your quarterly numbers. And that can be manipulated fairly easily. Well, maybe not easily, but it can be manipulated by creating perceptions about value, about market value and that sort of thing.

0:11:17.3 AS: And even more, even more than manipulated, it's just that if you don't follow, if all you do is just try to hit numbers on a quarterly basis, you're losing your focus on the long term.

0:11:27.1 JS: Absolutely. And there was a study, and this goes way back to 2005, but it said that corporate CEOs would sacrifice or 74% would sacrifice a long-term profitable initiative to make their quarterly numbers. They would throw it out the window. I think, if anything, that was 2005. I would think if anything, things have gotten worse since then. So we're actually talking about a slice of companies that really do want to be productive, where long-term productivity is their strategy. And that is, a lot of these are privately owned companies, manufacturers, and perhaps, there's some smattering of public companies that are doing this kind of thing, but it's rare.

0:12:24.7 AS: So let's just. So what we've been talking about is kind of the wall that you started to see, the ceiling that was Lean had a challenge, or Deming's teachings had a challenge, and that was this, overcoming the inertia, the lack of systems thinking, and this focus on short-term quality, sorry quarterly numbers. And very few companies were able to really focus on long-term goals of being productive. Now, maybe you can just take a moment to explain how your newest book, your latest book, then took what you saw from a Lean CEO and Deming and then brought it to another level.

0:13:07.8 JS: Okay, well, I interviewed about 60 people, and it's interesting. I thought it might be fairly easy, I would say. What are the basic myths? What do people get wrong? Usually, these are people that are pretty smart about Lean stuff, and people found that surprisingly hard to answer. And I think that was because a lot of these people I talked to had already been practicing this approach for a long time, so they really had to think about it. So it took some digging and a lot of interviews, but I found the thread was in five sort of primary areas, and one was the systems thinking, the pyramid that we talked about.

0:13:50.4 JS: That Deming so articulately talked about. Also, and then the other myths, I think, are somewhat derivative of that. But there's finance. The myth that the bottom line tells you what you need to know about the productivity of your company and it doesn't show up in the finances. So I did a chapter about that. The notion that the boss knows best, and that's not just the boss, it's also professionals. This idea of professional knowledge. Someone can go to school, learn how to tell people what to do, and that will accurately create the right procedures, the right kind of work.

0:14:32.6 JS: And when people follow directions from professionals, they will be the most productive. So that's a myth. Myth number four is the myth that people are motivated by sticks and carrots. And psychologists have disproved this about 70 years ago, I guess, but people still, if you look at compensation plans and you look at the way companies are managed and you look at structures, it's still assumed that people are going to be motivated by externals, by threats and rewards. So we talk about that and some companies that have dealt with that one. And then finally, there's this myth of tech omnipotence. We tend to have way more optimism about technology than is warranted, and we're seeing a lot of that in AI now. We're seeing a lot of disappointment with things not turning out the way people expected. So I really explored those five myths and how they stymie productivity and how companies can build a strategy around count.. what's the word I want? Counterattacking those myths or whatever.

0:15:45.5 AS: And then for the person who reads it, what is the outcome? So once they understand these risks, like number one, you mentioned about the pyramid and not understanding systems thinking. You mentioned number two about finance, you mentioned number three, about the professional or the boss knows best. And number four, people are motivated by sticks and carrots. And number five, tech omnipotence. Once they understand those myths, where do they go from there? How can they then apply that into their life and their work?

0:16:16.2 JS: Well, I suggest that they go into companies that are actually successful at dispelling these myths. You got to see it. But I have a last chapter, a long chapter, but I provide a sort of a roadmap for moving in. But there is really no alternative. If you want to build long-term productivity, there is no alternative to continuous improvement because you're just going to have to keep improving. And Dr. Deming explained that very well in terms of variation. It's always going to be there, and you're always going to have to be dealing with it. So you're going to have to create a culture, and it's going to be people-based. I don't care what kind of technology you have, long-term productivity gain is going to have to come from building the culture in your company.

0:17:10.1 AS: And I want to wrap up our discussion about this just so the audience understands. When you say productivity reimagined, what do you mean by the word productivity?

0:17:23.5 JS: Productivity is customarily just used as sort of a ratio. You know, people say, "Oh, yeah, I'll just take the total sales and divide it by the number of employees" or something like that. So it's seen as a sort of an indicator rather than something that you have to actually do. Right? That's something you have to actually pursue in a direct sort of way. And another, I'll make another side point, is economists like to say that take the GDP and divide it by the number of worker hours or whatever and say that's productivity. But it really, you know when you, the US government website defines productivity as increasing output with a given set of inputs. So from time A to time B, you've got to actually make more with what you have. And that's these indicators that people use for productivity don't reflect that at all. So you've really gotta... Productivity is not that easy to measure, and there's some, actually, some qualitative sides of it, right? I mean, if I'm making, say, ballpoint pens, and let's suppose I increase the production by 10% using the equivalent amount of materials and all the machinery.

0:18:51.9 JS: Well, that's great, but what if the quality goes down? You know, I haven't really gained anything. So it's kind of tricky to measure productivity. You have to get right down there in the processes to understand it. And so I would tell the finance people that it's inside that black box. You have to be in, understand what's going on inside that black box of operations to really understand whether, which direction your productivity is going.

0:19:20.2 AS: Okay. So if I hear that right, I think a lot of us could get lost in some sort of ratios or something like that and think about a measure. But in fact, what you're talking about is to really do productivity right, it sounds like you also really have to understand trade-offs. If you cut in a particular area, that's going to cause another problem, and that's going to...you may not be able to get more out of your existing resources. In addition, it's going to require work because you're organizing your company in a certain way to get a certain level of output with the inputs that you have. But in order to get a much higher level of that, you've got to rethink: How do I get the maximum out of this organization, which is a real challenge.

0:20:09.8 JS: Well, I think this is where this is, you know, it depends on how you do it, right? I mean, you can do it in a siloed way, which says, I have a quality department, I have an operations department, I have a maintenance department. And you can invest in all these and play around with your investments and see what works out. Or you can get into the process, and you can, by really, really understanding the process and letting people in the process improve it. That's where you get Deming's magic chain reaction, which is that you improve quality, and then your efficiency is going to improve and your costs are going to go down. But that's only if you're looking at productivity in a very broad way. It's not looking at quality in terms of the tolerances that I made on my grinding or whatever I'm doing. It's about the quality of the processes themselves. Right? So Deming was looking at quality with a big Q that encapsulates a lot of things.

0:21:16.0 AS: Well, I think what, what's, this is very interesting. And I know we're going to have a series that we're going to start doing, going through more detail of what you've discovered and what you want to share. So I'm really looking forward to that. And so, I appreciate this introductory discussion. And Jacob, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion and for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find Jacob's book, Productivity Reimagined, at jacobstoller.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming: "People are entitled to joy in work."