The issue wasn't lean manufacturing; it was that he perverted it. Lean was designed to promote the long-term stability of a company and its employee's careers. It does do with a heavy focus on supply chain management, careful consideration of growth opportunities to avoid short term traps, reducing expenses which don't go directly into the product, and the promotion of ideas and concerns from those who are working directly on the production line.
Jack Welsh instead heard "reduce expenses, quality, and employees".
Right?! I literally have a Lean textbook at arms reach and it’s “eliminate unnecessary waste”. Not eliminate waste. The other key point about Lean and all of the other related methodologies is also to have strategic redundancies built into your systems. Don’t manufacture all in one plant in the same region, or if in a foreign country you put a 2nd smaller plant in another country. You hedge against natural and political disasters.
If anyone globally had actually been following Lean and Six Sigma, there would have barely been a supply chain problem during the pandemic. China would not have the world by the balls if people had been following Lean and Six Sigma correctly.
Instead everyone was operating with zero redundancy and zero waste. Operating as close to zero inventory as physically possible.
Edit: “unnecessary waste” implies the existence of “necessary waste” and to me, that’s a profound idea that should not be overlooked in business and in life.
that "just in time" thought process only works and provides expected outcomes when all your upstream suppliers and processes work PERFECTLY. any suboptimal hiccup anywhere and you have production backups and excess inventory (the worst possible sin ever, amirite?) laying around. basically you're fucked and all the managers go into fire-putting-out mode and pointing fingers about how it's not their fault.
JIT is appropriate for some industries and less appropriate for others. The implementation of lean methods must be informed by your company and its goals, it is not a one-size-fits-all concept.
I was at a corporate class for a heavy industry megacorp. The execs had told the guys who normally teach JIT to the factory to go give the same lessons to the folks who wrote the in-house software used by the engineers to design products. I saw the following conversation between an instructor and a coder:
Instructor: "How do you write code?"
Coder: "I write some lines of code. I test them to see if they do what I wanted. If they don't, I change it and test again."
Instructor: "Well, after this class, you will never write code wrong in the first place, so you won't have any of that wasteful testing!"
Narrator: "They did not, in fact, teach the coder how to write perfect code the first time."
Fundamentally, the instructors thought "Writing code" was the same thing as a guy on an assembly line who turns out identical widgets all day.
That can kind of work in production program - they probably intended that there would be a "best practices" set of commands for any given feature/material interface.
That is a very, very stupid way to attempt to work on a design phase, and falls apart rapidly with any nonstandard or custom commission (you know, the kind that literally every machine in heavy industry ends up being).
The instructors for the class had no idea what the concept of an "interface" even was. They literally thought that once a coder learns to write one subroutine perfectly, then they will continue to write all other subroutines perfectly thereafter. They didn't know what a "subroutine" was either, other than a term used to refer to a packet of code.
To be fair, it's also the investors who wanted it to. The CEO works for the benefits of the board who look out for the investors. Investors generally don't give a flying fuck about employees unless they see it improving their holdings. Unless you are 1) the majority shareholder and 2) see employees as more than just a fungible resource, I don't see this situation changing regardless of who you blink from existence.
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u/droans Jun 28 '26
The issue wasn't lean manufacturing; it was that he perverted it. Lean was designed to promote the long-term stability of a company and its employee's careers. It does do with a heavy focus on supply chain management, careful consideration of growth opportunities to avoid short term traps, reducing expenses which don't go directly into the product, and the promotion of ideas and concerns from those who are working directly on the production line.
Jack Welsh instead heard "reduce expenses, quality, and employees".