Interview with Lead With Respect Coauthor （采访领导尊重合作者）.pdf

Interview with Lead With Respect Co-author Michael Ballé Q) Why have you chosen a novel format for this book (and the trilogy)? What is it about lean that calls for a fictional framework as a way of teaching a body of knowledge? A) From our very first book The Gold Mine, my father and I felt that the novel format would best convey that feeling of practicing lean on the gemba, with a sensei. I’ve been told that the engineers who designed the Prius had to find out the hard way that silence (the absence of noise) is not the same thing as thefeeling of silence. Similarly, Freddy and I believe that lean theory is not the same thing as the feeling of doing lean. There is a strong affective component to practicing lean. One faces several types of problems simultaneously: problems that, on the face of it, one doesn’t know how to solve—while working with people who don’t think the problem should be solved in the first place, or who don’t believe that the lean approach is any good. Lean issues are hardly ever simply technical: the political dimension of encouraging kaizen is a huge part of its success. We felt that fiction spoke to this truth most powerfully. The second reason for writing the learning experience as a novel is that we wanted to capture the system dynamics dimension of lean. At first we tried to write up what we knew as a manual, but we could never agree on a straight sequence. All the principles echo each other and any one sequence felt artificial or inadequate. We found that story and dialogue enabled us to make connections between the essential principles and show the links between, say, JIT and Jidoka, or between standardized work and 5S and so on. Picking one story helped share our experience with lean, which is that there are no final solutions. You resolve one problem after another, slowly rolling back waste, and learn from the process. Every time you try a countermeasure, the chances are you will succeed by only so much: perfor