We also continue to make heavy use of Six Sigma to drive quality improvements and lower our costs across the company.  Our Six Sigma savings in 2009 were nearly $500 million well above our target and all our business units exceeded their goals for the year.

I don’t know the nature of how Cummins achieved those savings, but for the CEO and Chairman to credit the savings to their Lean and Six Sigma initiatives is quite impressive, to say the least.

Below is one job description and contact information, but if you go to the Amazon.com website, there are over 50 open positions looking for people with experience in Lean Thinking and Six Sigma.

A Footnote: Incidentally, Apple is also looking for many people with Lean experience to be on the iPhone and iPod teams.  Just go to their site and poke around.

Director, Product Quality, Amazon Kindle

Our client, Lab126, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, develops and manufactures highly engaging and innovative consumer-centric electronic product solutions. The business has grown rapidly in size, scale and scope but still retains, at heart, the start-up mentality which has fueled its wild success.

But this outsized growth rate has not yet allowed for the creation of many of the systems, process and procedures (and their functional leadership) so vital to support the company’s continued advancement into new products and global markets. Hence this new position, Director, Product Quality.

Why You Want This!

• You crave the excitement of working with the visionary team which created the hottest consumer electronics gadget of the century. This innovative device, in its various iterations, has completely sold out-of- stock during the last two Christmas shopping seasons. All signs point to yet another blow-out performance in 2009. And, there’s more to come! What recession?
• You are obsessed with excellence and quality. This company is already attaining a level of world-class quality metrics that other consumer electronics makers would die for. Your mission: take your passion for quality and make it even better!
• You thrive in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial start-up environment where your daily decisions make a direct, clearly visible impact on the operational and financial performance of the company. You relentlessly pursue your personal and professional expectations for performance and results.
• You hunger for meaningful work with an exceptionally talented team, where it’s all about clear and open communication, genuine collaboration, and exceeding customer expectations – across the whole business.

Your Role

Define, lead and take ownership of the product quality organization. Develop world-class quality thinking and the programs, systems, principles and processes through which quality manifests itself throughout the company. The results of this effort will be threefold: exceed customer expectations in every way; reduce total warranty costs across all product lines, and; build the culture and supporting structures to ensure continuous improvement in both.

The position will be based in Cupertino, CA (Silicon Valley), California and will report remotely to the company’s Vice President, Global Supply Chain, who is based in Hong Kong. All product design, development and support functions are performed in California, while manufacturing is currently done on a contract basis in Shenzhen, China.  Lab126, our client is the wholly-owned subsidiary of highly successful and profitable Fortune 500 parent company Amazon.com.

What You Bring to the Table

• You have demonstrated both deep-dive, hands-on experience in shop-floor quality problem solving, and 30k-foot strategic-level quality issues perspective and sophistication.
• You have demonstrated the ability to rapidly and scientifically assess and deal with day-to-day quality correction, while simultaneously anticipating, developing and implementing the quality philosophies, infrastructure, and practices critical to the company’s future success.
• You offer a proven track record driving operational excellence and continuous improvement initiatives, focused on product quality, utilizing Lean Manufacturing (Toyota Production System) and Six Sigma methodologies.
• You have outstanding communications skills. This enables you to interact with senior management executives and influence their decision-making, as well as to effectively partner with other exceptionally talented people broadly across the organization.
• You have recently worked in a high-volume 3C (computer, communication, consumer), fast-moving product lifecycle electronics organization and have extensive on-the-ground experience in mainland China.
• Chances are your resume will include the names of other word-class consumer electronics companies such as Apple, Palm, Philips, Sony, Nintendo, Nokia, Cisco and more.

A Bit More Information

Travel – Because even the best video communications technology has its limitations, the Director, Product Quality should expect to travel frequently, at times on very short notice, to China.

Compensation – Excellent base salary, sign-on bonus and restricted stock units (RSUs). Equity awards consist of stock in our client’s parent company and are historically a major, continuing preferred form of executive compensation.

Contact Information

+1 (847) 304-5301 direct
resume@LeanRecruiter.com
az@LeanRecruiter.com

In this article, I’ll share a simple, pragmatic model that has proved effective for me in the past and, in proceeding blog posts, I’ll show several examples of how you can implement this model in your various turnaround efforts — from very small to very large.

A Crisis

Most turnaround efforts begin with a recognition that the business is in trouble.  This recognition typically comes through the review of a troubled balance sheet, or struggling EBITDA numbers or losing several key customer accounts simultaneously.  These are decent indicators, but they are clearly lagging indicators.  Most likely, the morale of the organization — if one has the awareness and the sense to feel — is a more accurate leading indicator for the health of a company.  Indeed in some cases, morale precedes financial trouble.

Creating Urgency

Once awareness of a crisis is realized, then productively channeling, communicating, and creating a sense of urgency for the entire organization is the next and ongoing step.  What the organization — what each person in the organization — will need to know, feel, and remember is found below:

1. How is the company doing: to be shared with complete, emotional honesty, and NOT intellectualized or sugar-coated in any way.  In a crisis, the organization cares more about emotional connection, not about intellectual or detached positions from the leadership team.  We’re all in this together should be the banner call.
2. This is what we’re going to do about it — short-term and long-term: An appeal and a return to company values can be very powerful here.  Remind the troops of what made the company great, the values that underpin the behavior of everybody, and how those values will be a guiding light in how to navigate through the crisis.  Then, be very specific about the steps to be taken and milestones we expect to reach and when we expect to reach them.  Doing this will give confidence to the organization and will empower them to ask themselves “How can I help?” or “What can I do?”
3. Here’s what you can do – specifically: Your employees will want to know exactly how they can help navigate the organization through the crisis.  They are yearning to do something meaningful and important — help them find a way to contribute in a meaningful way.

Your employees are adults and they can take bad news with dignity.  Be honest.  Don’t sugar-coat.  Emotional connection is the key here; people will see right through any statement or behavior that isn’t authentic or sincere.

The Plan and Change Management

Your plan should be very specific, addressing the key themes and parts of your company crisis.  That plan will most likely require change — it has to: if you keep doing the things you were doing before the crisis, then you’ll just extend the crisis even longer.  You must do things differently — which requires change management.

If you keep doing the things you were doing before the crisis, then you’ll just extend the crisis even longer

A simple model that I’ve used in past turnaround efforts — both big and small — is the model below:

The model follows basic human development patterns of Unaware, Aware, Understand, Believe, and Act. Below is a more readable image of the behaviors in each of the human development spectrum:

In any change effort, you will probably have, in general, people that might be considered Saboteur, Fence-Sitter, and Fully-Committed.  This model also explains the specific behaviors that define what it means to be Unaware, Aware, Understand, Believe, and Act.

In proceeding blog posts, I’ll explicate on each role in this change model and how to build a strategy from it.

Poka-Yoke (ポカヨケ), translated, means mistake-proof, or fail-proof.  In it’s simplest form, it is a method that prevents failures.  Poka-Yoke is a critical piece in Lean Thinking, pioneered by Shigeo Shingo.  Examples of Poka-Yoke might include:

• Clocky, a clock that prevents you from sleeping-in
• A Key can enter a keyhole in only one way
• Needle cap, to prevent needle pin pricks
• A Microwave stops working, when the door is opened
• Aza Raskin explains Poka-Yoke for Humane Interfaces (Aza is a friend of shmula & his dad invented the Macintosh – Jef Raskin)

In their FDA approval press release:

We are focused on developing medicines that use novel technologies designed to reduce drug liking and make it more difficult to extract the active ingredient.  We anticipate a September 2009 launch for EMBEDA (TM).

Utilizing King’s proprietary technology, EMBEDA(TM) contains extended-release morphine pellets, each with an inner core of naltrexone hydrochloride, an opioid receptor antagonist. If taken as directed, the morphine relieves pain while the sequestered naltrexone hydrochloride passes through the body with no intended clinical effect. If EMBEDA(TM) is crushed or chewed, the naltrexone is released and absorbed with the morphine, reversing the morphine’s subjective and analgesic effects.

At the heart of Poka-Yoke is Prevention and an awareness of Human Frailty: we want to stop problems before they occur.  Indeed, preventing abuse, addiction, medication dependence, tragedy to the individual and families, or death, is a novel and innovative use for Poka-Yoke.

Put another way, a Spaghetti Diagram is a visual representation of how bad things really are and are used to expose Waste and Opportunity.

How Bad are Things, Really?

Sometimes, through poor thinking and poor choices, Spaghetti Diagrams aren’t just representations of how things are, but they can be representations of what we have created: sometimes, we turn our processes into Spaghetti Diagrams; this is precisely the case with the U.S. Government and the current Healthcare Debate.

The Democratic Party’s proposed Healthcare scheme is below ¹:

This map begs several questions:

• Where does it start?
• Where does it end?
• Are all motions equally important?
• What are the value-added steps?
• What are the steps we can do without?
• Can a 15 year old understand what is happening on this map?

It is safe to conclude that the map above is clearly bloated — complexity at its worst.

For me, I have a question that drives clarity and honesty in my thinking:

Can a 15 year old understand this?

If the answer is “No”, then I need to work harder to make my idea clearer and simpler.  Using that question as a litmus test for the Healthcare Scheme above, I believe the answer would be a clear “No.”  In other words, the Map above is a starting point, not an ending point: there is much to improve.

One area not exposed by either of the above maps is, perhaps, the most insidious of all: amidst all the confusion and motion are people that could potentially be harmed.  The patient is the true casualty in either of the above maps: she gets lost in it — indeed, we forget that at the center of Healthcare is the patient.  Broken processes enable our forgetfulness of people.

Broken process unfortunately helps us to forget people

Another map worthy of Spaghetti-like accolades is below ²:

Again, the presence of many squiggly lines means one thing: OPPORTUNITY for improvement.  This is clearly a starting point, not and ending point.  There is so much to improve.

To be fair, creating a future-state of the above is not trivial, underscoring the fact that Healthcare is clearly complex.  One thing is clear, if anything needs and begs improving, it is Healthcare where the biggest opportunities lie ³.