| Lean Sim Lite™ Now Available! | |
We have the heard the needs of our customers and responded! The long-awaited update of the Lean Sim Machine™ has arrived.
The Lean Sim Lite™ is the same as the original in form and function. It has simply been manufactured using lighter materials, making it much easier to use on the road.
 The Lean Sim Lite™ brings you these features and benefits:
· It is finely crafted of lighter woods than the original's oak, and several of the components are now made of polymers in place of metal/wood, which greatly reduces the overall weight.
· Including the Leader Guide, the unit weighs just  69.5 lbs. - which falls within the baggage weight limit of most airlines.
· The entire unit comes in a large, hard-sided rolling suitcase, making it easier for 1 person to transport.
· As an added bonus, the Nut Towers now come with pre-finished tops in gold, silver and black, for easy reference when running the simulation.
For long-term use at one or a few close-by facilities, we still recommend the sturdy, long-lasting original Lean Sim Machine™.
 However, if you wish to take advantage of the Lean Sim Lite's™ transport capabilities, please contact the Network office at 517.332.8927 or office@scanlonleader.org to order yours today!
2008 Prices for Lean Sim Lite™ and original Lean Sim Machine™:
Scanlon Leadership Network Members:
$2900
Non-Network Members
$5900
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| | Assessing Gainsharing Readiness - Part II: Translating Readiness into Success | | 
by Brad Hill, Certified Scanlon Consultant
Many organizations with an interest in gainsharing look to external benchmarking practices to determine if a competitor or admired organization's program can be applied in some fashion to their own organization. The effectiveness of gainsharing in your organization will not be related to outside successes, but rather to the culture and work environment at your organization. This article will help you assess whether gainsharing will improve business success in your current work culture, or what can be done to begin creating an improvement-oriented environment.
In the July 2008 issue, we explored The Enablers of Successful Gainsharing Programs.
Translating Readiness into Success
Effective gainsharing programs successfully integrate business focus, process improvement, continuous communications and rewards.
Business Focus
Employees need to be aware of what ROI is, and need to recognize what factors drive ROI and which of these factors they can impact. The gainsharing payout formula should include factors under employees' control that drive ROI, and exclude factors outside of the employees' control.
Create more superordinate goals. Changing from individual incentives to team or line incentives is a positive move. Of course, there are some "hard working" employees that may complain about "carrying the slackers." Companies need to drive out the "slacker" mentality, but they also need to drive out the "carrying the slackers" mentality. All employees need to focus on what they can do to help the overall system excel. This may mean placing some pressure on peers, creating a new process or exploring alternative areas where the slacker may have a greater chance of success. Companies must not give in to pressures for those individual rewards that may suboptimize overall performance. Create more superordinate goals that challenge employees to work as a team and to improve larger, more integrated work processes.
Process Improvement
Not only must each employee have line of sight to business success, but he/she must have accountability for improving the processes that they are involved in, and a mechanism for ensuring that improvement ideas are examined. Invest in training.
Continuous Communications
Employees must receive frequent communications on financial/operational successes, the status of their ides, and the link between their ideas and business success.
Gainsharing programs must seamlessly communicate the "what", "how" and "why" behind the expected changes and the program's success. Factors such as performance management dimensions, business measures (such as quality, productivity, schedule performance, cost reduction), and process improvement techniques (Kaizen, Juran, quality circles or Deming), must be developed in unison and presented to employees as an integrated program. Following is an illustration of this message.
· What are we trying to accomplish? Improved performance in key business drivers and an understanding by every employee of what they can do to impact these factors.
· How are we going to get there? Kaizen, Juran or Continuous Process Improvement (or others) and a commitment to training employees in the competencies that will result in increased contributions.
· Why will the organization and its employees invest in these efforts? The results of these efforts will mean more profit for the organization and more compensation to its employees.
· Communicate the reasons behind the payout. Companies should establish closer ties between employee improvements and the program's payout. More important than the payout is the reason for the payout, and not that "productivity went up" or "costs went down", but why the business succeeded.
Rewards
Gainsharing payouts must be self-funded and tied to process improvements resulting from employee efforts and to the positive behavioral change that motivated these efforts.
Don't view gainsharing as a pay plan. Gainsharing should be viewed as "a commitment to employee involvement that ties pay to improvements in total employee performance." The success of these programs is based fundamentally on the ideas that employees have for improving processes and the gains that these improvements generate. The pay element is a reinforcement tool that makes certain that employees are fairly compensated for their incremental thoughts and energies.
Several years ago, a unionized division of a Fortune 100 organization voted in favor of a one-year, quarterly gainsharing plan pilot by the narrowest of margins. The pilot went four quarters without a payout. At year-end, the union voted on whether to renew the gainsharing plan. The outcome? Employees voted in favor of renewing the plan by a wide margin. Why? Since the introduction of the gainsharing program, supervisors and managers seemed to pay more attention to the efforts and ideas of the employees. Despite the program's compensation shortcomings, the work environment had significantly improved.
| | Why Do a Captain's Reality Check? | | 
by Jahn Ballard
The leadership at Toyota have a crucial practice - the question that they always ask in policy setting at the senior strategy levels - "What's the Gemba?". They want to know all the relevant facts of a situation before they decide what to do about it. Sounds like common sense, but how often do we actually do it? How many of you feel that having complete and relevant information from all levels so you can make a fully-informed decision is often a luxury you cannot afford? If that is the case some of the time, what is it costing you?
Knowing the facts of the whole situation is also what Doc Hall of the Association. for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) is proposing as a crucial first step in dealing with the realities of Compression. (If you missed the two previous issues where I introduce this new book from Doc, you can check them out at scanlonleader.org in the Blog section.) In his last chapter, Doc points out the need for a comprehensive self-audit as a way to get at the Gemba. The Network will be hosting an Executive Retreat in December to explore Doc's provocative and challenging ideas in depth.
One of the most crucial pieces of the Gemba is the actual economic status of the
company at any given time. Most unfortunate is the fact that using standard financial statements to understand the economics of operating reality in a business is not what they were designed or intended to be used for. They provide a fragmented picture of the past that makes little or no sense from an operating perspective. Not only are they distracting from processes and unrelated to behaviors, they tend to separate people, and are almost never connected effectively what is really important to them. Finally, the link between financials and KPIs (key performance indicators) is often fuzzy, if it exists at all, making the connections to future-state cash flows and profit difficult, if not impossible, for the people who actually do work to know or understand.
So if we agree that the Gemba is important, then what is the state of not just the
financial system, which Peter Drucker in Managing in the 21st Century called "a 500-year old system in terrible shape", but also the rest of the measurement system
financial measurement usually dominates? What would you use to get at that?
In Dr. Dean Spitzer's book Transforming Performance Measurement, Jack Stack, Chairman of SRC Holdings and author of The Great Game of Business says " This book teaches how to accept reality . . .The reality that measurement usually does not provide timely and meaningful feedback to the people who need to know the results of their decisions and actions." One of the most powerful reasons that duplicating Toyota's performance has eluded the vast majority of US Companies attempting it is because we do not have a comprehensive and systematic environment for senior policy leadership to rigorously know the answer to the question - "What is the Gemba"
I propose that the crucial first step is for the CEO to do his or her own 'Reality
Check' from their unique perspective as the 'Captain of the Ship'. I have developed
three self-assessments for the 'Captain' of the ship to start with to get at the overall situation as they see it now. They are the Organization Design, Leadership Capacity and Performance Measurement self-assessments, which I am happy to both share and go over with any CEO or GM that is interested with no strings attached. In addition, Dr. Spitzer's book has two powerful instruments for this purpose. One supports the assessment of Measurement Maturity and the other Organizational Trust. He and his publisher, the American Management Association have given me permission to use them to begin benchmarking around these two pivotal, yet often over-looked dimensions. If assessing the status of these domains in your enterprise could be of use, let me know to share them with you.
In order to get at the Gemba, it is also crucial to take an integral view of the
operations finance situation, for which purpose I have invented the Financial
Dashboard in partnership with Chuck Kremer, CPA, and the Maryland Association of CPAs, which has a free four-period demo at www.financialdashboard.com, and the use the Financial Scoreboard, invented by Chuck Kremer, who is the lead author of the seminal book, Managing by the Numbers. Both of these Integral Operations Finance resources provide a toolkit for building a whole system view of the numbers, and help to provide links to the KPIs. I have also developed another dozen short instruments on my own and with colleagues to get overviews on Resource Utilization, Organizational Capacity, Personal Learning Styles, Ideal Worklife Vision, Financial Literacy levels, Cultural Resilience and a number of other dimensions.
One could say that an organization is like a multi-thousand piece puzzle. The first
step to having fun and succeeding in putting it together is lay out the border. I assert that it is crucial for the Captain to know their own picture of the border on their own terms first. Once they have the puzzle laid out for themselves, the improbable mandate is that they should not tell anyone about it. They will only really get at the whole Gemba if they then enable their people to go through a Discovery Process themselves as a group, with the Captain remaining silent virtually the entire time, and observing what happens when their people have the direct experience of confronting their collective reality by themselves.
Speaking further about Transforming Performance Measurement, Jack Stack goes on further to discuss, ". . . the importance of dialogue. It also reaffirms my belief that successful organizations develop a special language, a language of numbers. Once you develop it, and as you build on it, the outcome is pride, self-esteem, teamwork and trust." Toyota's second crucial leadership practice they call Nimiwashi, which literally translated could be said as 'preparing the soil for transplanting the seedling'. They have a highly developed art of discovery and diplomacy the consistently creates environments where policy setting is graceful, easy, quick and usually exactly right for the context with which they are dealing. Next time we will explore briefly how to set Nimiwashi capacity-building in motion in any US business culture.
Jahn Ballard enables Owners/Entrepreneurs/CEOs and their senior teams to design their ideal jobs, focused primarily on fully leveraging the talent available and evolving the business' value. Employees spend more of their time doing what only they can do for the good of the enterprise, and their time overwhelm and distractions are transformed.
| | First Scanlon Innovation Simulation Conducted! | |  Kim Johnson, a Scanlon associate consultant based in Minnesota, delivered the first Scanlon Innovation Simulation this week at Johnstech International, located in Minneapolis, MN. Johnstech is a leading manufacturer of test contactors used for semiconductor production testing and device characterization with a proven track record of new product development.
Although Johnstech International has a highly effective technology team, Charlie Potter, Johnstech International Chief Technology Officer, realized the value in understanding innovation at a deeper level and invited Kim to facilitate the Scanlon Innovation Simulation for his product development group. Charlie and his team learned about the concept of 1 + 1 = 3 and the power and value that comes from synergy and innovation when the project team collaborates and works together solving problems and taking risks; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts alone!
The Innovation Simulation is the latest proprietary application tool developed by the Scanlon Leadership Network, was demonstrated at our annual conference in Dearborn and is now available for your organization. We invite you to call the Scanlon office for more information on how this tool can energize your organization's innovation process.
| | Creativity is Central at SGS Tool Co. | |  Charlie and Maria Girsch of Creativity Central recently completed 5 Creativity workshops at SGS Tool Co. in Munroe Falls, OH. Charlie and Maria had presented a fun, energetic, and informational keynote at the Scanlon Annual Conference in May, and SGS was excited to tap further into the potential of unleashing the creative force in everyone.
The workshops, presented to more than 300 SGS Associates, encompassed 2 days in order to cover all shifts.
"It was a grand learning experience. We absolutely enjoyed the challenge and the response and would love to continue making an impact within the Scanlon community" says Charlie. (pictured)
See the Creativity Central web site for more information.
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