How does a Toyota guru (i.e. Toyota manufacturing top executive) help a large enterprise to achieve its NEW goals?
- First, a good dialogue over 2 days with the each of the enterprise's top 5 executives: on many subjects, a few of those subjects would include the 6 below:
- Historically what are the Plans and achievements so far to date? How well is "Management By Objectives" (MBO) practiced over here?
- What is the current level of understanding of (Dr.Deming's PDCA) Plan, Do, Check (and reflect), Act-Adjust? Reviews of progress are formal (written) or informal and at what frequency- weekly?, monthly?
- Are all the 12 Corporate Base Elements being covered? Please see my earlier blog posts for QCDSMPTEFGIR. Q= Quality, C = Cost, D=Delivery, S=Safety, and so on.
- How to describe "the culture of improvement" in this place(s).
- What are the ''dynamics'', or driving forces, that exist to get new goals accomplished? Are these within the "culture" or the character of the leader?
- What are the biggest roadblocks?
- Secondly, the guru shall a) define their "management system" and present culture, and b) find THE NEW necessary amendment to that "management system".
- This amendment takes the existing system and shoulders it with The Toyota Way (i.e. Lean Management Way).
- A healthy understanding of this change is next. The 5 top executives wring out this change amongst themselves with the help of the guru.
- Some questions amongst themselves will be "Are we prepared to make a change ourselves?" "How do we do this in bite-sized increments?" "Let's be sure we keep it simple!" "Which tools and techniques are we ready to deploy now?, and later?
- Thirdly, a more widespread basic training begins for the Top Management levels. This can produce more fine tuning to the management system amendments as the guru and the Top-5 listen to the other executives and work to get it right for the entire enterprise.
- Culture change will be evident and will need to be addressed as a major objective itself.
- Fourthly, Plan the management system change implementation. Keep it simple!
- Benefits: The Toyota Way management system gets objectives DONE.
- More on that at http://www.mma.ca/
Thanks for reading,
Mike Davis; mike@mma.ca