I understand the difficult balance between doing what a client wants versus guiding them to do what's needed.

Is the customer always right? In many cases, no.

They call and want you to give a speech about 5S. There's a choice other than "being quiet and doing what they want" and "yelling and screaming that they're wrong." You can educate them that, like you said, Lean is about a management system and a culture, not just tools.

A consultant or speaker needs to know how to push back gently, to educate them, to lead them. They'll be better off for it and the consultant/speaker is better off, in the long term. You might lose that opportunity, but might have a better business long term.

At some point we have to recognize that while the principles of Lean are pure, just, and good, they are inevitably held back by the relationships between the people who must both learn their importance, implement them at the principle level...and do it with each other.

Those relationships, if we look at them authentically, are mostly a poorly defined collection of interactions driven by dysfunctional, unconscious, self-serving agendas, with a little bit of hope that it will someone all work out.  As Mike already identified in his article, department managers just want to make themselves look good.

Why are we so obsessed with making ourselves look good?  Probably because we all have a lot of work to do at learning how to make someone else look good, and if nobody else is going to do it, we have to do it ourselves, right?  (How's that for a root cause?)

What's that...I should practice what I preach, you say...I should leave a comment on Mike's blog that isn't just about self-promotion?  :-)

OK, fine.

Since I've read most of Mike's books, and met him personally, I'm qualified to say the following.... Mike is a Lean Yogi. Someone who is so deep into all the principles in this field of study that it has become a personal practice for him.  Much in the way yoga or the martial arts is a personal practice on the physical level, Mike practices Lean with the same humble dedication one sees of a master in any field.   As a result, whenever I get notified that he has written a new article, I stop what I'm doing and read it immediately, simply because I have that much respect for the knowledge he has accumulated, as well as respect for his own continuous improvement efforts in how to apply that knowledge.

Thanks Mike, great article!

David

The difficulty of dealing with CEOs is that they are focused on the wrong things - financials, the individual, activity. This makes for a difficult conversation. Too many CEOs don't really understand the work that is done in enough detail to write a mission statement. How can you manage or have a vision about something that you don't understand? It is done everyday with disastrous consequences.

This is true for any improvement method that an organization may embrace.

The systems thinking principles you (Mike) write about of holistic improvement are missing everywhere. This Age has shown to be good at being reductionists, but when we need synergy or the ability to put things together into a cohesive whole it all falls apart.

One thing I have discovered is the very acceptance of a functional design makes a service organization susceptible to complexity, waste and being uncompetitive. Cross-functional teams working to improve their holistic system . . . the ability to redesign roles and in many cases rid themselves of the functional specialization of work is completely ignored leaving a chasm of opportunity missed.

As far as CEOs, we have a choice to succumb or stand for something . . . or die a slow death or live boldly for profound change. I believe the compromise is to adopt different principles in an organizational trial on a small scale (0f course). New roles, new design for a holistic system, that is improvement.