Overview

Lesson 7: If you're not simple, you can't be fast, and if you aren't fast, you can't win.

Going to Japan to see world-class performance and then doing kaizen will help you understand the power of simplicity. The more I learned about world-class performance, and the more I faced the challenges of introducing change at Boeing, the more it began to disturb me that in many of our speeches inside and outside the company, we talked about being world class without really knowing what that term meant. We used the term casually, and we all thought we were world class already because we had the majority of the market share and were number one in aerospace in the world. Why wouldn't we be world class?

I began to realize that we'd never break through all the operational paradigms facing us unless we really studied and internalized world-class performance, regardless of the industry. Our leaders needed to study world-class performance see it, talk about it, believe it, set metrics, and then lead it and do it on the job at Boeing.

In the end, that is precisely what happened, but it did take a while, as well as firm leadership by a Boeing executive, Bruce Gissing. The process began in 1984, when I arranged for Norman Bodek, North America's Japan Study Mission (JSM) pioneer, to come in and brief about 40 of our top operations executives about how the Japanese were creating a world-class production system. The briefing...