The Missing Ingredient in Building Lean Culture – Part 1

The Missing Ingredient

Building a Lean culture is usually an overarching pursuit of Lean program. Various things have been shared in the public domain regarding how to build and maintain a Lean culture. Yet if you review all of the important ingredients that have been suggested, you will notice one critical thing has been left out - the environment. The environment here is referring to not the meaning used in sustainability, but the ecosystem the company is in, the living environment, or the “context of organization” as used in ISO 9001. I’d like to specifically call out the resource availability aspect of the living environment. That, although left out, can be a more dominantly deciding factor than any man-made effort in shaping a culture. The environment aspect may be left out due to people can’t do much to change it. Yet, ignoring it is like burying head in the sand. It can make cultural building less fruitful without being understood.

The Qualifier

I’d like to mention my exposure to Japanese culture, which enabled me to uncover this missing critical piece. For a good part of 3-year timeframe, I spent time extensively in Japan deploying Lean Sigma program in our plant. Over the weekends, I traveled extensively across Japan, reaching almost all of the corners Shinkansen can reach. I also visited many Toyota plants in both Japan and US, including Toyota City, Nummi and Kentucky plants. With such a huge contrast from US, I deeply felt the inherent tie between the living environment and the way of living.

The discussion to be continued in

• Part 2 - The Significance of The Missing Environment Ingredient
• Part 3 - The Implication and What to Do