Hshs“Hello Charlie, I want to report on our last Lean Kaizen event. It was great! We gathered together with the local management and process planner, got ideas together and managed to take out 3 Employees from the process. This translates into an annual saving of more than 150T Euro. Isn’t it great?”
“How about trust?”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Did anyone loose his job?”
“Well, we will not have to extend the contract of the 3 affected employees. I know this sounds harsh, but otherwise we will not be able to reach the saving targets this year.”
“What is your goal? What is your purpose?”
“You are making some strange questions today. Of course, the purpose is to cut costs to be more competitive and increase profits for our company.”
“Cut costs? That is why you come to the company every day? Is that your purpose?
“As a factory manager, it is my responsibility to achieve the saving targets set by the corporate office. Yes, that’s one of my targets”
“As a factory manager you must have some bigger goals to reach. Some bigger purpose.”
“Besides reducing the operation costs, I need to make sure we have a good delivery reliability and quality. These are the 3 pillars on which our performance is assessed. Additionally, there are new product developments which need to be introduced in the factory and other strategic projects to ensure our long-term success.”
“Sounds like you have a lot of challenges. “
“Yes, but I have excellent employees to support with all the projects to reach these goals.”
“If 3 of your shopfloor guys just lost their job due to an Lean project. Do you think they really trust you? Do you think they fear?
“Yes. Probably they will fear loosing the job, but in the current situation that can not be avoided. We all have a certain fear of loosing our job. We can not afford to have so many employees on our payroll”
“Let me ask you a few more questions: Is your focus on cutting costs or on creating more value? Is your focus on achieving the targets or on having the best processes? Are your employees responsible for order execution or also for problem solving? Are you thinking in years or in decades? “
“Many questions… Let me think.”
