LEAN!!!

“Hello Bob, Bob.”

“Well you know Bob, you have to do what you have to do... I hope your firings go real well”

-Office Space

As this helpful image below (painted in pretty colors and with small words for management consumption), lean can be thought of as any business buzzword with the word lean in front of it and let me tell you it is all the rage with the economy being slow atm.

Now assuming you have not Pavlovianed on me and gone into a powerpoint induced comma on me from that image, we should go through what this actually means for you (and me unfortunately). To quote the source of these fine articles (please go here to see the original and REALLY learn about lean ;) )

“To most of us the term Lean would hopefully suggest no fat or a minimum level of fat and applying this to business would imply minimum levels of waste. Clearly this would then suggest that to become lean we must remove that fat or waste from the business processes to leave, wherever possible, just that activity that adds value to either the external or internal customer. Whilst this would appear logical, actually understanding that which is of value versus that which is not, and then applying this to all aspects of a business is difficult. And often the answers do not lie within the grasp of management (no arguments here- Matrim) running the business, but with people who are actually closest to the process (IE have others do managements work for them- Matrim) and hence better placed to see the value and waste.”

Now, just as much as the next man, I enjoy a moderately lean delicious (buckhorn) burger, that being said, without fat we are left with a dry, flavorless brisket of meat (owl burger)waiting to be gnawed on (sounds yummy don’t it). Well, the man wants to take your delicious and tasty buckhorn burger and give you a BK whopper (sans cheese, too much fat). Naturally this is a bad thing for pretty much every one of us who’s business has implemented this policy. For those who haven’t seen it yet I highly recommend renting Office Space (you can see a cutscene from it above) and watching the parts with the Bob’s in it. This is pretty much a lean implementation before the term had been coined. Hiring consultants to interview you for your own job and fire you. This of course leads to a “leaner” business (and no, losing weight will not make you lean enough for them).

Both my Wife and I are both now in companies practicing this lean thinking (the brain is mostly fat you know so really, how well can “lean” thinking really work?) and it is no fun. She has by far seen more of this than I (being timed doing routine jobs, having daily “lean” meetings to see where improvement is needed and having her desk rearranged for her to a uniform, lean design... ie, yes they took her preverbal stapler or rather paper clips in this case). Clearly this will make a business run more betterer and survive as the economy collapses.

To make a long story short, in theory, cutting out the weak links in business would be a good thing. GE is a great example of this (not that I would want to work there nor could you pay me enough to but that is beside the point, Southwest Airlines and Wild Turkey are the way for me ;) ). GE fires 15% of its lowest achieving members of its workforce. This not only cuts out the non-performers but puts the fear of God into those that do. This gets the company all kinds of great things like unpaid overtime, employees competing day to day against each others for their very jobs, motivation to cut out the “fat” in their day to day processes etc. Truly a stroke of managerial soulless brilliance.

In the real world, ie. everywhere else, management isn’t even smart enough to whip their employees for fun and profit. Instead, they simply want to look like they themselves are doing something so it is not their jobs that get axed (think Dilbert Boss here). Their implementation looks something more like this: hire random consultants at exuberant rates to waste time every day wasting their employees time, stressing employees (without the generation of bloodthirsty competitiveness seen at GE) and taking employees (cheap) NECESSITIES like paper clips. What about this does not make sense. To put it another way:

$70K/year consultant+multi $k in wasted employee time - a .05 cent paper clip > then letting people do there job.

The fact is, just like the burger mentioned earlier, fat makes people (especially Americans) happy. Whether its the customer that gets more bells and whistles from a product (even if it cost a little extra) to the employee who enjoys their Swingline or pension or cheap group picnic (we call these job PERKS btw, they tend to make people WANT to work (well) at some smart business’ ie Southwest Airlines) everyone benefits from not have the stress and inefficiency that the current implementation of lean management is creating today. It is these little things that often get people through their soul-starving work days. To help fund all these goodies I propose we begin by firing all of the Creative Arts and Literature Degree “consultants”, cut out at least one rung of middle management and spread the reward to everyone, employees that are the ones actually doing value added processes and to the customer.

Either that or write a virus that will “rip off these business big time.... so everyones dream of never working again is realized” -lose Office Space exert. ;)