Cooking up a lean, not mean, strategy

I probably type the word efficiency and its various forms more than a hundred times a week. That’s 5,200 times a year, far more than I’ve ever used the `, or backtick, button. I should probably figure out how to swap that key to write “efficiency” instead of `. (What the hell is it even for?) That would save me something like 2,600 seconds a year, or 43 minutes a year.

That’s just one small change. Imagine if I cared to search out waste in everything I do: How many seconds, minutes, and hours could I save? How much more effective of a leader could I be?

These are the questions devotees to continuous improvement and lean principles constantly ask themselves. And I met a lot of them while writing about manufacturing in a previous life. They dogmatically adhere to Six Sigma, Kaizen, and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). When I moved over to trucking, I found leaders here practice what lean preaches, usually in a more holistic way.

TPM, for example, is all about making equipment work reliably through a series of workflows and rules. Fleet folks just call that preventive maintenance. They follow the OE recommendations and industry best practices and learn from experience.

From what I’ve seen, that’s because most lean principles are common sense—and a survival instinct. For Marshall Sheldon, a journeyman mobile technician for MHC Kenworth in Macon, Georgia, his experience has taught him that parking his service truck too close to a downed semi on a dirt patch could get him stuck. Getting unstuck takes precious time he could use to take on a new job, so he stops farther away. But all his tools are there, so he puts all his wrenches on a big metal ring and takes the whole lot to avoid walking back and forth. His apprentices see how well that works and will repeat it when they get their own truck.

A big part of implementing lean is measuring data, and Sheldon could have tracked his steps on a smart watch and filled out a spreadsheet to see if the wrench ring was worth it, but lean is also all about simplifying things. In this case, measuring would be a waste of time.

But when he needs to teach his trainees about conserving fuel by not idling, those fuel expense spreadsheets would tell the story better.

Both strategies save time and are worth doing, of course, but you have to question how much time you should spend implementing a net-positive efficiency workflow or process. If one of your wily veteran techs has a faster or better way of doing things, like how they set up a diagnostic cart, do you need to form an action committee to see if all carts should look this way or just have that tech send an email with a few supporting images?

But if that same tech recommends a new way for all triage to be done, you should vet the results before deploying across multiple shops. Putting in new lean workflows without verifying consistency and repeatability can lead to unintended consequences.

For a great example where you can learn about lean leadership as well as be entertained, watch “The Bear,” a show with efficiency baked into its core. On the surface, this Hulu show is about a dysfunctional award-winning chef, Carmy Berzatto, who moves back to Chicago after a tragedy and tries to turn his family sandwich shop into a Michelin-starred restaurant. But at its heart, it’s all about continuous improvement and efficiency (coincidentally just like my feature on lean management). It’s also about the perils of chasing perfection when greatness will do.

Carmy spends countless hours and money on expensive ingredients to create the perfect menu that will dazzle and impress, all while pantomiming a busy dinner rush in the under-construction kitchen, making sure each movement, like grabbing a plate, falls beneath a certain time threshold. When it doesn’t, he tweaks the layout plan to shave a second off here or there.

It’s an exhausting way of life. Carmy’s forehead veins bust at the seams due to the stress, and when his employees don’t meet his unmeetable expectations, he freaks out, screams, and goes out back for a smoke, as one does in a restaurant. They in turn walk out, leaving the operation shorthanded.

But the young perfectionist is so crazy because he was taught by his mentor that “every second counts.” She had those words on her kitchen wall, and Carmy does, too. He lives by them obsessively, and as an emotionally immature manager, makes his crew miserable most times by trying to be the best. And as it turns out, the experienced chef’s whole “every second counts” mantra was about enjoying every moment of life, to stop and smell the flour, not to race a stopwatch to please some pretentious gourmand.

Keep in mind ensuring superior customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal of lean—and any shop, restaurant, or business that wants to keep going should target that. But think about how you get to that destination. Does the continuous improvement initiative you’re planning make things more complicated? Does it take months of meetings that lower morale and productivity? Most importantly, does it make you a critical jerk who compulsively points out waste? If any of these are true, the leanest strategy is to accept not everything can be perfect or optimal.

Seek to remove waste, but not at the cost of your team’s sanity.