Book review # 23 : The Lean Turnaround
I currently attracted to all the things “Lean” recently, considering quite a new management concept that start out but not exclusively as a part of manufacturing management model. However, it is now considered as a strategy that have to be applied across the company.
The author of the books has been implementing lean strategy in various US based companies both in manufacturing and services business. Therefore, lots of example will be mentioned in this book about those companies.
This book stress that contrary to popular believes, lean is not just a “manufacturing thing”, it’s a strategic approach that covers all angle of business management.
The main thing that considered most importance is that the transformation must come of people in the company not the machine or technology. Lean is also a time-based growth strategy which takes time to implement, don’t expected to get it done in days or even months even. It takes a committed team to be able to pull this off. The mindset is to get the ideas generated from the people in the line of work not just couple managers in the meeting rooms.
“in any business, the only element that are capable of true transformation is people”
Lean strategy needs to start with lean leadership which is the opposite of a traditional leadership where the working mindset is give orders, hire the experts and stay out of nitty-gritty. Lean leadership is about involvement, if we are talking about manufacturing firm, the CEO will have to be involve on the factory floor to some extend detail instead of giving orders in his or her ivory tower office.
“if you don’t try something, no knowledge will visit you”
Before reading this book, I highly recommended that you should get yourself familiar with the kaisen concept becuase it was referred to many times in this book. Also, it’s one of the fundamentals of lean strategic implication.
This book is quite practical is the sense that it has laid out couple useful framework. For example, it stated that standard cost-accounting is the “anti-lean” concept it rewards the activities that the lean concept trying to avoid. Take the inventory for instance, in the lean world, inventory is considered the root of all evil becuase inventory itself is a waste to value-generating. However, in the cost-accounting world, it rewards those who built inventory by allowing them to defer portion of their production costs to later period. This concept is very interesting that I myself needs to get another book which give me more details of this issue.
Since there might be some technical stuff needs to be review later, I recommend that you should take short notes along the way while reading this book as I do so.
It is a nice book for top management and CEOs who really wants to transform the way their company works and thinks. Hopefully, it will be the fundamental of your “lean” organization in the future.
8.5/10
Cheers
Tab
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