What if engineers better understood how their product was about to be used before making it?

• Rash, uninformed decisions based on misconceptions lead to a colossal waste of talent, time and resources that slows companies down and limits growth.
  • The lean education system is the antidote.
• The goal of the book is to introduce a deeper understanding of lean so that we can build a faster, people- and customer-centric company
  • A company that can adapt swiftly to changes in its environment

Opportunity

• Companies make a lot of mistakes, that gradually slow them down, until they loose the support for customers and become easy pray for faster, more aggressive competitors.
• When people better understand what they do and why, they're better at everything they touch and the company moves faster.
• With fast growth, silo and complexity increase faster than revenue
  • Symptoms:
    • Defending process over customers
    • Defending silos over teamwork
      • For executives, reaching department-level goals has become more important than helping each other for the benefit of the company
    • Rewarding compliance over initiative
      • Prevent initiative by enforcing compliance
    • Confusing legacy and heritage technologies
      • Heritage technology (competitive advantage) vs legacy technology (obstacle)

Command and control (4D)

• Define: management team defined the high-level challenged
• Decide: they weight pros and cons and alternatives. The plan becomes the strategy of the company
• Drive: Management craft a story to sell to investors and employees. They create a roadmap, name people in charge of the major milestones, set ambitious performance goals, and start driving the strategy across all departments
• Deal: After weeks the teams struggle with the new plan. Managers have to deal with decisions taken far away from the reality of the field. They think about change the strategy, and the cycle starts again.

Problems

• Morale: Every cycle brings unwanted changes and new problems.
• Talent: The most talented employees and managers are assigned the plan from the higher-ups, if they cannot make it work they burn out
• Innovation: The company only benefits from ideas from a handful of people. They might be detached from reality.
• Revenue: Missed opportunities make costumers to look elsewhere
• Profit: Developing products that won't sell or solve any real problem wastes a portion of hard-earned profits

Lean