Tag: Womack

Karoshi: The difference between efficiency and a lack of ability

Recently I’ve written a few articles on the scam which is Lean manufacturing.  It’s not that the work of Womack, Jones and Roos in The Machine that Changed the World is inaccurate in its observations of mass production cultures versus lean manufacturing strategies—but that their academic lenses failed to identify the crucial ingredient that made Asian efforts superior to those in the West.  In essence, it is the Japanese word Karoshi which allowed for the explosion on the scene of the revolutionary work ethic for which those three observers tried to capture in a bottle to save the West from itself and start a new kind of industrial revolution based on Lean manufacturing methods.  The Japanese specifically are willing to outwork the rest of the world and put country before self even over small things, which is why the comparisons in The Machine that Changed the World made traditional mass producers look so terrible in side by side productivity comparisons—yet nowhere in their book did they successfully make that point.  The closest they came was in declaring that the transplant operations in America were more successful when they had Japanese managers as opposed to American.  With all things considered equal, American workers, American labor laws, and American supply chains, Lean manufacturing did show dramatic improvements in American productivity—only they typically only worked best when the manufacturing plant was conducted by Japanese leadership as opposed to those of Westerners.  If you break that down even father it is because of the Japanese tendency toward Karoshi that one was more successful than another—the willingness to put in the time to build such a Lean culture at the management level.

For whatever reason at the end of the 2017 calendar year a lot of people have been pushing me to discover what my next book will be.  Honestly, I have a number of fiction projects brewing on the back burner but at this point in my life it’s all about business.  To many people from the outside they look at my life and think I, like the Japanese, are functioning from Karoshi—which is their word for burnout—or death by work.  After all I do work with people from those far-flung places on the other side of the world and even by their standards I work longer days and compress more into my 24 hour day than they can imagine.  What makes me different from other people is that I have this background in Western arts, (a form of martial art) that has also made me a very efficient person—personally, which for Christmas this year I shared with some of my employees for their benefit.  (click to view)  Working harder isn’t necessarily good—but working smarter is.  My lessons to others about the nature of the bullwhip is about more than just a novelty act—it’s an actual philosophy for which I run my life—and without it I’d be in the same boat as everyone else.  And now for the last couple of years I have been experimenting with Cowboy Fast Draw which has led me to several conclusions regarding Lean manufacturing—and that my next book will likely deal with these Western methods of approaching business that are of the next generation of thinking.  I need to tweak a few things first before committing them to paper—but my next literary project will likely have to do with this crucial issue.

One thing that led me to Cowboy Fast Draw to begin with was my engagement with many American manufacturers who were getting frustrated with my methods as we were setting up a massive supply chain together and many of them put up a lot of resistance—which ran counter to my way of thinking. Most of these people were classic mass production people—which I think still has a lot of merit to it from a traditional standpoint.  Their companies have made them adapt Lean techniques so being the typical students of Western education systems they went and memorized all the charts and graphs—and the Japanese words for things without understanding the core philosophy of what Lean manufacturing did.  When they ran up against me they would frustratingly utter that I’m all too willing to “shoot from the hip” too often which led to a name they called me behind my back as a “gunslinger” which to their minds was an insult.  We call quarterbacks in football gunslingers when we want to insult their impatience in the pocket to throw too many risky passes.  Only the risk isn’t that all that risky to my mind.  Using bullwhips and now shooting techniques that do not involve aiming I am extremely accurate and fast in those hobbies and naturally I carry those elements over into my personal life.  Just because you can make fast decisions on critical elements without a process map to guide you, it doesn’t make you risky, only “ultra efficient.”

With the help of Womack and many others Japan has been placed at the top of manufacturing respectability for the last half of a century and why not, they earned it. But there has been a cost.  Their very industrious culture in Japan is suffering from Karoshi to the point where 1 in every 5 people are suffering tremendously from it—and if you subtract females and elderly people, that leaves most of the adult males from age 20 to age 50 pressed with overburdened stress that actually makes them less productive.  Of course the slack-jawed hippies and micromanaging academics think that the solution for the entire industrial world is to force companies to regulate their workers to a 40 hour work week—which is pretty stupid.  That is no solution—because the work demand is a product of production necessity.  There is a need for the work, otherwise it wouldn’t exist.  And forcing workers to only work 60 hours a week forces payrolls higher which hurts companies because they have to add to their overhead—which academics don’t care about because that’s their solution to everything—being that’s their role within education societies.  The work is needed and you can’t just throw bodies at the problem because all those bodies are not equal—everyone can’t perform work at the same level.  But we can focus on performing work in the most efficient manner possible, and doing that we can greatly reduce the need to overwork ourselves.

I personally work 60 to 70 hours per week and I still have time for many things in my life.  Outsiders might look at my pace and declare that I’m at risk of Karoshi myself—but they don’t understand.  To explain it to them I’d use one of my bullwhip tricks in putting out a candle with it to show how speed, accuracy and judgment can all come together to project focused efficiency into very tight target radius.  Or in the case of Cowboy Fast Draw where a gun has to be drawn from a holster and shot into a target in under a half a second—the work still gets down.  If the goal is to shoot a gun into a target, that task can be done whether it takes a half a second or up to a minute as the shooter takes their time aiming the weapon and firing.  The fast draw artist is obviously much more efficient at performing that basic task.  They might be able to shoot that same target 20 or 30 times while the cumbersome minded shooter wastes huge amounts of time pointing and aiming. The aiming is only a task needed for those who lack the faith in themselves to perform the task.  So in essence, the reason that countries like Japan have so much trouble with Karoshi is that they have brought in so much work—their society cannot process it all on time using the methods of approaching that work which they are utilizing now.  They need methods that still perform the work, but only much faster and still have the accuracy needed.

When I hear some inefficient person—whether it’s the president of a company that is filled with inefficient workers and is struggling to meet quotas, or an old-fashioned engineer who says we are working too fast to not make mistakes I get pretty mad.  What they are really saying is that I should bend my life to their limits because I can do all those things fast and accurate.  Speed does not mean a lack of quality—it’s only a detriment if the person performing the task is an inefficient human being.  And that is the essence of human behavior that Womack never addressed in his Lean manufacturing work—and why I’m not a big fan of the guy.  The reason the Japanese beat the West in manufacturing over the last several decades is not because of Lean methods.  It’s because they simply were willing to outwork the world to climb back on top after they lost World War II.  It was their path to redemption.  Now however that the world has looked to them for the method to perform work, the pressure is crushing their culture with high incidents of Karoshi.  And I’m saying there is a better way, one that still has all the efficiencies—but puts more of an emphasis on speed so that productivity doesn’t stack up behind the incompetent—but that the good manager can figure out who can do more in less time than the sluggish mind of those less capable.  That is how we solve the problem of being overworked even as the world demands more productivity at a much more rapid pace.  We can’t say no to that challenge—we simply have to figure out a better way to do it—which I’m thinking seriously of helping to formulate.

Rich Hoffman

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The Death of Lean Manufacturing: Self confidence and experience can’t be tracked on a graph–but they make everything possible

I normally don’t cross the streams of my projects but I had an experience recently that was worth sharing, and well heck, it’s Christmas and if I can help a few people today—then why not.  For professional reasons I had to re-read The Machine that Changed the World which was written by three college academics, Don Jones, Dan Ross, and Jim Womack.  I never liked the book even though there are some very good things about business within it.  Instinctively I hated the message of Lean manufacturing—to me it was like a cult—but being in manufacturing in a leadership capacity I obviously had to know as much about Lean manufacturing techniques as possible to talk the language with everyone else.  I needed to re-read the aforementioned book because the project I’m working on requires it heavily so I had to pull the baby out of it while disposing of the bathwater you might say.  To me the elements of that book that are good are guided largely by Mr. Womack and are things I learned instinctively by working really hard for a very long time.  I didn’t need Womack to tell me to decentralize my processes, or to have horizontal management systems.  Or to build as much of a product as close to the same room as every other process to maximize efficiency—or countless other similar things.  I’ve understood those concepts since before that book was written for a 1990s audience.  Rather I am quite certain that Womack and his friends sought to use academia to become part of the manufacturing world for their own self relevance in the late 1980s and that they’ve scammed many businesses into buying in to this Lean concept which was essentially to use common sense techniques sharpened after several decades of mass production methods as a base point, and to unite the world and its governments under a common manufacturing technique which would unleash globalism to the masses.  However, Womack and his academic buddies were wrong—and I’m here to declare that Lean manufacturing is dead—if it were ever alive really in the first place other than selling itself as a Frankenstein monster of copied techniques not really understood for why they worked, but only that they did.  The next method of global manufacturing technique is likely somewhere along the lines of what I presented to my manufacturing team as a Christmas present witnessed below.  It’s a radical idea which I think was always the essence of Lean manufacturing but will be further drawn out by necessity in the future—the role the individual plays in utilizing minimal force for maximum results as a cascading effect of influence which comes from The Power of Positive Thinking. It’s a major metaphysical shift in thought which takes the globalism out of manufacturing and instead recognizes the immense power that an individual plays in the utterances of productive output.  I provided a demonstration using my bullwhip as a metaphor for daily action.

Once I cleared childhood and the natural fears that come from being little in a big world—like loud noises, water, falling and speaking in front of people, I have been fear free most of my conscious life.  I have never been a person who functioned from fear; I never feared authority figures, bullies, or circumstances beyond the horizon of the living world.  And no matter how harsh the world was, I never backed down from it.  In spite of living a very aggressive life I’ve never had a moment of crises where I gave up and turned away.  I’ve certainly wanted to, but I never have had that experience of defeat in the face of a challenge.  I never thought to because nowhere in my mind was anything ever supposed to be easy. I never had that contamination of thought.  Even as I read more books than any contemporary I know, I also understood that such a practice was quite common in the year’s past.  As a young man not yet out of my twenties I took my family to Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello because I thought it was important for them to have that experience in life.  Privately when our guide explained to me that Jefferson’s library started the Library of Congress, and that the former president had read voraciously over 1000 books—I silently endeavored to outdo him.  It was a goal I set for myself, and a lofty one.  In that regard my formal education has never stopped as I now read books like Womack’s for lunch.  I am currently re-reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations just because I am sure the message of 2018 will be all about capitalism as the Trump presidency turns it loose once again—and my role in all this is to explain it to people.   I enjoy my role and I love my books—but most of what I know came from the unique circumstances for which I learned to live in the world—and the many hard jobs I have had while being completely fearless about the actions that would come at me from day to day.  Over a twenty year period of my life I did every kind of job imaginable, from cleaning toilets to being a great sales closer.  I worked in every kind of assembly environment and at every level.  And while I was doing all that I became a very respectable bullwhip artist—and in my head all those things do go together.

Having no fear means that I approach things without restrictions of thought.  For instance, the little presentation I did professionally was unique because most in my position would never risk the credibility to their reputation to start with.  What if I had missed that candle, or not delivered my speech correctly?  I could have done more damage than good.  But the most important element to my life that makes me unique and good at what I do is my self confidence.  I never worry about not achieving something because I have enough personal love for what I do and know to trust it.  I have been tested in every way that a human being can be, and fear has tried to work its way into my life for decades, but it has never found an unlocked door for which to color my thoughts with even a single self doubt.  Part of my presentation to those very nice people was to show them that part of what makes people good is that practice and confidence which can deliver them to the promise land of prosperity.  And that it doesn’t always take force, it just takes focus.

What made the Toyota method work in Womack’s analysis which launched the Lean approach to most things business these days, was that the Japanese had a samurai culture which bred this kind of self-confidence, but additionally as people from Asia naturally worked well together in a team setting.  After World War II they were an occupied country dominated by their former enemy, the United States.  So with the same vigor that they kamikazed American ships at sea with a never say die attitude toward conflict, they sought to exploit the weaknesses of American manufacturing’s mass production techniques and applied their own spin built from their ancient warrior codes.  Using the American Deming as a foundation they invented Lean manufacturing as a way to put themselves back on top of the world and recover their losses after the war—and college academics like Womack and his friends saw a vehicle toward globalism for which they could hang their star.  But they all missed the point.   Europe as well never quite understood Lean manufacturing.  They certainly understood the team concept of brothers before stars and all that—but they could not get the idea introduced by the Japanese of lifelong employment starting at the bottom and working your way to the very top—always staying at the same company to preserve the assets in training for which each individual brings to the table.

The next wave of manufacturing philosophy will embody some formal core element for which I shared with my business partners above—and which I share with you today.  It doesn’t matter to me whether or not I am talking to only 150 employees or 30,000, the message of concentrated individual effort is the same—and the trust in themselves to do whatever task is needed.  For my demonstration, putting out the candle in front of a crowd when I have everything to lose and very little to gain was more than a stunt for some Holiday cheer, it was a demonstration in self-confidence that I wished to share for a more profitable 2018.  Nobody who works for me is the type of people I want to be scared when I walk into a room.  I wish for every human being on planet earth the same reality I have—a no fear approach to everything, and if I can get them there with some instruction, I’ll do it every time there is an opportunity. However, the keys to good business is not from formalized education or in methods of team building that ignore that there is no I in team, but there is in win—but that victories large and small come from the individual focused on what they are doing and sprinkle into their productivity a self assuredness that was always in the underbelly of Lean manufacturing.  That confidence never came from a European style chain of command, but from living and being confident in what you do in a microcosm so that the macrocosm was better off for it—and that is the real trick.

Just as I explained that to put a candle out with a bullwhip requires placing the small sonic boom right in front of the flame—a good productive life is just as delicate.  In putting out candles to do it successfully requires many thousands of possible trajectories of movement to get that sonic boom to occur in just the right place. My experience and practice allow me to find that spot quickly and within a few attempts.  When I did my demonstration the way to assure more accuracy would have been to mark on the floor the exact distance from the candle.  But I didn’t do that, nor did I use a targeting fixture for which I was accustomed.  While those things might have given more closer to 100% accuracy, they would have been meaningless for my demonstration.  I simply went down to IKEA for lunch and picked up whatever candle arrangement they had for the Holiday season.  Everything was very spontaneous which forced me to react to those changing circumstances and illicit to my audience the self-confidence it takes to pull off something like that.  Once they had seen me do it, then in their own minds it unlocked the possibilities they likely all thought about—and it was my hope that it didn’t just make them better employees for me, but in every aspect of their lives.  And in that statement is the key to the next generation of manufacturing and all things related to production.

Rich Hoffman

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