Overview

Enumerate a few basic principles and then permit great amounts of autonomy. People support what they create.

Margaret J. Wheatley

If we are to successfully implement best practices for assuring a highly reliable manufacturing process, then we must achieve buy-in and ownership of the process from top to bottom within a given organization. At the senior level, executives must "enumerate a few basic principles and then permit great amounts of autonomy," and, as Wheatley ^[1] also states, " minimizing the description of tasks, and focusing on the facilitation of processes for following those basic principles." Through this new found autonomy, people will support what they create, because their participation in the creation process assures their commitment. It is also essential that we understand where we are and where we want to be (through benchmarking), creating a kind of cognitive dissonance. And, understanding the gaps, we must develop our improvement plant, execute it with a team of committed people, and measure our performance along the way. These are fairly simple, yet powerful concepts, which are far more difficult in practice. Yet we have little choice in reality.

Where to start? Beta executives have measured their plants' performance as compared to benchmark plants, and have identified areas for improvement. (I hope you've been doing something similar to this as you've read this book.) This effort must be recognized as only the beginning, not the end, and must not be followed by decision making that involves an...