Harnessing the Wisdom of Lee Kuan Yew - Lean Thinking

1. Core Competencies for the Modern Workforce

We start with a long quote (apology).

“Unlike workers in the repetitive, machine-based age, tomorrow’s workers must depend more on their own knowledge and skills. They have to manage their own control systems, supervise themselves, and take upon themselves the responsibility to upgrade. They must be disciplined enough to think on their own and to seek to excel without someone breathing down their next. Works in the new economy cannot be content with just problem-solving and perfecting the known. They must be enterprising and innovative, always seeking new ways of doing the job, to create the extra value, the extra edge.”

Humans have a limited amount of time, but our abilities and understanding can always be enhanced. It’s not just about acquiring knowledge but taking action. It’s surprising how many individuals are open about the challenges their teams and divisions confront, yet few are willing or know how to take steps towards resolving them.

One of the advantages of adopting the?Lean Thinking?and?Lean Six Sigma curriculum?is that it equips you with a systematic approach to transforming problems into solutions. It provides you with the necessary tools to dissect the obstacles you encounter and solve them through proficient data analysis, process redesigning, team participation, and selecting appropriate solutions.

Please browse through our?Lean Six Sigma courses?to grasp more insights.

2. Moving away from Twitter management

We have moved as a society to clickbait, instant attention-grabbing headlines, and this is creeping in across the way mid and senior managers want to consume information. With time pressures everywhere, senior management wants access to bullet point information to appear informed and even make decisions.

Let’s take Goh Keng Swee as an example; Swee was a key Cabinet member and “troubleshooter”. His role was to support Lee Kuan Yew. He did not do this by sending a 1-pager or a few bullet points on WhatsApp. Yew explained, “He sent me books, articles, sidelined and flagged, insisting that I must know enough to decide what I had to approve.”

The overburden, the time pressures, and the constant crazy days can not be fixed by receiving bullet points on essential issues. Time is our most precious asset, and we must all learn to protect it better. We have to choose more carefully how we spend our time. Does what I am doing create any value?

Senior leaders must protect their time by delegating and building capabilities in their direct reports. Hence, they have daily quality space to understand the key issues and make the right decisions.

3: The Leadership Circle:?

“We must develop and nurture our talent so that innovation and creativity will be integral to education and training”.

Where should you start if you are a leader looking to improve your impact and effectiveness?

The Leadership Circle Profile? (LCP) is a validated and powerful 360 leadership development tool that provides a holistic view of a leader’s effectiveness. A true breakthrough among 360 leadership assessments, the LCP integrates multiple well-known theories of leadership into one model, but unlike other models, is underpinned by a unique development framework that not only helps identify strengths and areas for development but it also illuminates the conscious and subconscious beliefs, motivations and thought patterns that drive and reinforce behaviour.

The LCP measures 29 well-researched competencies that are proven to be correlated with leadership effectiveness and business performance and is based on self-perception and the perception of chosen evaluators. The detailed and visual representation of the scores provided enables a leader to quickly identify the most significant and vital drivers and detractors of their leadership style.

With the support of a certified coach, a deep dive into the LCP gets to the source of human behaviour, offering new awareness, insights and the opportunity for long-term, sustainable and meaningful change that will drive effectiveness, impact and business performance.

If you want to know more about our certified?Leadership Circle Profile?coaching,?contact?Catherine. She is our certified Leadership Circle Profile practitioner.?Get in touch here.

4: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Management – The Key Traits for Success

Entrepreneurship:

We must continually seek new opportunities and take calculated risks if we do not want to go extinct. The Lean Startup is an excellent approach to starting your entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial journey. What would you like to learn more?

Innovation:

Innovation is about creating new products that add value to our customers. But for many of us, it’s about innovating our internal processes to add more value. It’s about finding new ways of doing what we do. Finding ways to update and change the way we run our operations and our processes. It’s also about challenging and changing our internal structures to support our processes better to create more value.

Management:

Managers need to empower their teams to innovate.

“Human talent is at present the most scarce and valuable resource for creating wealth in the knowledge economy”.

From Senior Management to front-line leaders, managers must provide the proper foundation, structures and culture that encourages people to strive and grow. It’s about ensuring everyone has the same opportunity to excel if they wish.

5: The Race to Adopt Technology?

In a rush to adopt the latest technology, whether RPA (robotic process automation), Cloud ERPs, the latest SasS (Software as a Service) or AI, companies must remember that automating inefficient non-standard processes worsens the process.

Bill Gates said,?“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Companies are wasting millions of dollars, automating overly complex, non-standard processes in the rush to automate and adopt the latest technology. The requirement-gathering stage is painful because of all the non-standard ways teams have adopted their local processes over time.

This is where a longer-term view is needed and the willingness to standardise and then optimise each process before looking to automate. A manual method you can change tomorrow, but a digital process can take months to change.

As an example, one of our clients, a global pharmaceutical client, wanted to improve capacity within their Global Service Center. The client wanted to automate; they even had a KPI to automate several processes. But by standardising their global processes across markets and then optimising them (reducing inefficiencies and waste), we delivered a 30% increase in their capacity. In the end, only one process was a natural candidate for automation. Investing thousands of dollars to automate others did not make sense.

The results as the Global Service Center expand its scope. This freed up more country resources to focus on creating more value, and increasing market share. You can learn more about our?Consultancy services?here