Meeting our Goals
If the pinnacle of Operational Excellence is a smooth implementation of Lean in less than two years at Medrad, then the core of the mountain is the application and evolution of systems and processes to support such a change. Woodward's article on communications and Scriabina's article on dealing constructively with customer "opportunities" are clear examples of such systems. They include concepts such as Six Sigma analysis, quality systems, maintenance programs, process mapping and flow, and even Jishuken.
At the foot of this allegorical mountain lie the simple, trivial support mechanisms that lubricate change. Crandall's Cs is a comprehensive list. In GP Deltapoint's work we find that even these are not sufficiently detailed ideas for many organizations beginning an improvement journey. Even more fundamental (maybe under the mountain!) are such Hows as goal deployment, core soft skills and meeting management.
A wag has estimated that over 73 million meetings are conducted around the world each day. A Wharton Center study found that senior executives average 23 hours a week in meetings; middle managers average about half that. Only slightly more than 50 percent of the meetings are productive. We concur: many meetings should never have been held. Meetings to gather information that should have been gathered by reading or listening to customers are not legitimate. Meetings to disseminate information that others should have found by reading or listening are not legitimate. Neither are those for digesting information or getting others to develop your opinion on critical matters. Or those for ducking responsibility by participating in group think.
Legitimate meetings plan a project or move it forward. They have a goal, a facilitator who subordinates their opinions to the progress of meeting, a means of decision making and a process for creating action items and following up (5W1H or 5W2H for example). Of course they start and end on time, at which point you may look back, and discover that you have moved a mountain.
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