Next Level Leader Blog

10 Leadership Lessons of "W.A.S.P Lean 6 Sigma"

  

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Lean has been around since the founding of this country.

 (America is where I'm sitting right now. - For those of you from Astonia, I would love to have you respond below with your own list.) 

In fact, Lean concepts are as old as time. The tools and methods continuously change, hopefully improving. We could go back to Leonardo da Vinci, Socrates, or Moses, but let's see what Ben Franklin et al had to say about Lean.

W.A.S.P Lean-six sigma principles for Leaders

1. Eliminate Waste "Waste not want not"

2. Quality "Anything worth doing is worth doing right"

3. Clean work space "Keep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee." 

4. Principles "A Lie stands on one leg, the truth on two." 

5. Respect "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"

6. Systems thinking "Blame-all and Praise-all are two blockheads."

7. Continuous improvement "Look before, or you’ll find yourself behind."

8. Pull "Necessity is the mother of invention."

9. 5 Why's "Weighty Questions ask for deliberate Answers."

10. Feedback "If you do what you should not, you must hear what you would not."

And one for good measure, my favorite:

Profound Wisdom "Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting."

Clould have been said by Deming

In this age of rapid change we prey for progress, and sometimes get it. In some areas we seem to require learning the same thing over and over again.

Leadership of organizational excellence, is one such arena that never tires new branding for tried and true disscoveries of Peter Drucker, Edwards Deming, Margaret Mead, and Dale Carnegie.

Each new generation of leaders, now lasting about 5-10 years, has to learn some things over and over again. They're being encouraged by consulting firms eager to market the new breakthrough leadership brand. They start with a clean slate, Tabula Rosa. (No, not the video game, the Aristotelian one. )

(Remember the .com era leaders who insisted that the old business models are irrelevant only to re-discover that cash is king?)

Why do we all have to learn it again? What happened to what we spent so much money, time, and talent on learning years ago? To top it off, once again, healthcare is following 5-10 years behind private industry.

Don't get me started!

___________________________

On the other hand ... most of us learn best from experience.

"One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning."

James Russell Lowell, an early American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat is quoted as saying,

So ... Let's get to it, re-learning leadership of organizational excellence.

"Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today."

But this time, please, let's avoid the Muda!

and, let's make Lean worth the investment!