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A Good Quote (from 1882!)
October 10, 2007
I'm prepping for a presentation I'm giving next week on Lean leadership styles and I ran across tihs great quote that John Shook shared at his presentation at the Global Lean Healthcare Summit earlier this year. I wanted to share it:
"It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done."
The quote is from Samuel Smiles, the British author of the book "Self Help" and Shook says his 1880's writings were a favorite of Sakichi Toyoda.
If you're struggling with the idea of "how do we learn about Lean?" Reading helps, but you have to go and try something. Run experiments, learn from your experiences. Hopefully, you work in an environment were "smart failures" are OK. That's an idea that applies to any workplace.
Do you treat kaizen (continuous improvement) as a scientific method type process? Do you follow Deming's PDCA Cycle? Part of that "Check" cycle includes the possibility that the change did not go the way you might have hoped. Do you feel pressure to pretend that all of your ideas were good ones? Does your organization celebrate any experiment, regardless of the result? If not, that might explain why your people are "afraid to change."
Posted by Mark Graban on October 10, 2007 | Comments (0)
