The Remedy: Bringing Lean Thinking Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization

Chapter 4. How Will We Change Their Thinking?

Our Town Hall kickoff generated a lot of blogging, almost all of it positive. People want us to succeed. Fred May's smirk bothered me though. Something bad was coming.

Regardless, I had to put my team together. I was looking for six people, each with a solid foundation in the basics:

• Value and waste

• Standardized work

• 5 S and visual management

• Flow

• Pull

• PDCA and problem solving

• Strategy deployment

I wanted both mavericks and system builders—people who could short-circuit the system and get things done, while building a better system! Antonio Villarreal and Rebecca Johnson, my NJMM team members, would anchor the team. They were both delighted to join us.

Antonio is stamping plant manager, a hip and creative Mexican who designs theater sets in his spare time. He understands both the people and the process side of Lean. Our stamping plant is world class. Moreover, Antonio has transformed our human resources activities, a special assignment I'd given him. He'll be our eyes on manufacturing and people processes.

"People make the difference," Andy taught us. Yet our human resource (HR) division is seen as Mordor, the realm of darkness. Maude Beecher, EVP of HR is widely reviled for her handling of our traumatic downsizing, during which veteran employees were treated like dirt.

Becky Johnson is a mechanical engineer from Fort Worth. She's a devout Christian who just returned from Peru where she helped to build an orphanage. Becky has helped transform our ...