Lean Six Sigma For Leaders

8Delivering Everyday Operational Excellence

IF YOU'RE READING this book in order, from beginning to end, you'll know now how powerful Lean Six Sigma can be as a tool for problem solving and process improvement. If you're reading by dipping into different chapters to find what you're looking for, you probably already knew that. But now you're about to discover that Lean Six Sigma can be equally powerful when applied to the ‘operational management’ of an organisation – how the work gets done, and how to do it more effectively by working with processes, and the people that know the process, to achieve ‘everyday operational excellence’. By the way, if you are a ‘chapter dipper’, good for you! John F Kennedy famously said, ‘Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth’. We certainly believe in thinking about things differently – see our sections on the power of Assumption Busting in Chapters 4 and 5.

In this chapter you will see that the principles of Lean Six Sigma translate readily into principles of day‐to‐day leadership and management, and they provide the basis for an approach that is repeatable and reproducible. In most Lean Six Sigma books, you'll find Repeatability and Reproducibility being applied to measurement systems (you can find it referenced in this book in Chapter 3), but used here it describes a way of working where individuals are consistent in their own approaches, and where they are also consistent with others in the organisation.

Consistency definitely ...