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“The most important factors for success are patience, a focus on long term rather than short-term results, reinvestment in people, product, and plant, and an unforgiving commitment to quality.”

This is a quote from Robert McCurry, former Executive VP of Toyota Motor Sales. It’s a great quote which captures in broad brushstrokes some of the essential characteristics of successful lean companies: long-term thinking, a focus on developing people, and kaizen. At the same time, to companies struggling with short-term challenges, these words can seem like happy talk. Many of us feel like we need to take action now, ideally not at the cost of the long-term, people or quality but to see results today. This is a delicate balance. We need to think long-term, but act each day with urgency.



This has to begin with leadership. From Jeffrey Liker’s book The Toyota Way:

The biggest crisis a company faces is when the leaders believe there is no crisis or do not feel a passionate sense of urgency to continuously improve the way they work.

FC is an in-house lean manufacturing consultant who coordinates the training and implementation. Lean is new to this organization, with most of the focus being on 5S for the past two years, with a recent interest in the other aspects of lean. A few weeks ago FC asked in an e-mail whether we had a checklist to gauge the sense of urgency of the staff. We don’t have such a checklist.



Although by no means a full checklist on a sense of urgency, at a minimum I would ask the following of FC’s leadership:

read full article (by By Jon Miller ) on http://www.gembapantarei.com/