Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The authors, Dan Koger and Greg Brower, each have nearly 30 years of experience, as corporate employees and as consultants, helping organizations use innovative, effective and affordable kaizen/continuous improvement techniques to become Cash Machines. Dan is an associate professor of communication at Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, KY. Greg is president of GAB Consultancy in Simi Valley, CA. Greg can be reached at gab4iso@aol.com.

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CASH MACHINE

Trafford Publishing

Contents

Introduction.....................................................viiChapter 1 - Your Cash Machine...................................1Chapter 2 - Adopt Kaizen Values.................................7Chapter 3 - Kaizen and ISO......................................13Chapter 4 - Keeping "Your Company" Alive........................21Chapter 5 - Myths and Realities.................................32Chapter 6 - Kaizen/ISO - The Foundation.........................43Chapter 7 - 3D Problem Solving..................................53Chapter 8 - Building Powerful Teams.............................76Chapter 9 - Communicating for Dollars...........................91Chapter 10 - Leading the Cash Machine............................99Chapter 11 - Setting Cash Machine Priorities.....................104Chapter 12 - Cash Machine - Yes or No............................126

Chapter One

Imagine this.

Your organization has never been so strapped for money. You've downsized, throwing some of your most valuable people over the side to save scarce payroll dollars. You've postponed essential research and development projects, prayerfully hoping the whole time that your competitors don't come up with a game-changing breakthrough. Banners festoon company walls urging employees to conserve everything from paper towels to ballpoint pens.

And yet, in the midst of all this scrimping an annual ritual unfolds.

Accountants total the money your company still wastes each year on such systemic rat holes as warrantee payments, product and service rework, often accompanied by angry or lost customers, inspection and more inspection of products and services, workers compensation premiums, work place injuries, resignations of top employees, and other recurring, resource-sucking activities.

Let's peg the number at $5 million, more for larger companies, less for smaller ones.

Now imagine that amount in the form of five million one-dollar bills, heaped in an ugly green pile in the middle of the employee parking lot, with employees and leaders gathered around chanting "burn, burn, burn."

Executive aides with cans of gasoline soak the money.

Then, as employees watch breathlessly, company leaders hurl matches into the fuming mass. Flames roar. The sky turns a $5-million shade of orange.

But wait! Now imagine this.

As those loyal aides finger their cans of unleaded regular someone in the crowd, armed with a really loud bull horn, shouts:

"Wait right there! Why are we doing this? That's our money! Why are we wasting it, especially during these perilous times?"

At which point a wizened veteran of dozens of these fiery rites slowly rises and says: "It's what we've always done, young man. It has to happen. We cannot stop it. It's just a cost of doing business."

The bull-horn-toting skeptic stands his ground, or her ground. The rebel raises the bull horn and blares:

"Why don't we stop piling up all that wasted money in the first place?"

To which that aged guardian of company culture snaps, with a withering air of finality: "And how would we do that?"

Seizing the moment, our trouble maker shouts into the bull horn, "bring in THE RIG."

Suddenly a gate opens and in comes a massive yellow front-end loader.

Reaching the money pile, the loader driver lowers his scoop, hauls up a hefty helping of doomed dollars and gently drops them into a bin marked "Research and Development." The driver takes another scoop of loot and drops it into a bin marked "Employee Training." The scoop keeps digging until all the dollars are in bins, bound for improved productivity and higher profits, not fiscal blood letting.

Painted in big letters on the sides of the rumbling yellow money scooper are the words "CASH MACHINE."

Where do you get such a wondrous contraption?

Simple. You build one, using resources you already own

All you need to get started are a couple of well-known, if under-used and often misunderstood war horses from the world of quality-management:

Kaizen/continuous improvement, a technology that dates from roughly the dawn of time.

ISO certification, a technology that dates from roughly the 1980s that can give you a jump start on becoming a kaizen organization.

But wait. Don't savvy organization leaders already know how continuous improvement and ISO certification can help save lots of dollars in the short run and very likely save their organizations in the long run?

Some do. Tragically, though, many more don't. In fact, too often leaders don't even give it a try. Reasons abound. Here are some that we hear:

"Who needs continuous improvement? We're already the best in the business. No one can lay a glove on us."

"Never heard of ISO certification. What in the world is that?"

"Continuous improvement-isn't that a Japanese thing? We're Americans. We run things our way around here."

"ISO! No thanks. That's just another pack of government regulations."

"Continuous improvement! That's a lot of hooey. Any idiot knows if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

"ISO certification costs an arm and a leg, and we'll have nothing but a piece of paper to show for it."

"Continuous improvement and ISO would mean change. Forget it. Too much disruption here already, especially with the economy in tatters."

"We already have ISO certification. Didn't you see the banner over the front door?"

"We've been around for decades. We'll be here for a lot more, no matter what."

"Sales have never been better. Why spend money on lots of change that we don't need?"

"Maybe someday, but not now. There's a recession on. We can't afford it."

The list goes on. For now, let's cut through the objections and get to the real questions:

Will you be the wizened veteran standing in the glow of your burning money who insists: "We've always done it that way; who needs the change?"

Or will you be the bull-horn-toting skeptic who shouts: "Why?"

While pondering your choice remember what we discovered years ago-complacency can kill you.

In Chapter 4 we draw you a picture of how this happens, using what we call the "Organizational Survival Model." On the model, you can track your organization's place in the unending race to survive in a world of blinding change and innovation.

In such a world, a moment's lapse can drop you hopelessly below what we call the Change/Tech Curve-the third rail of organizational survival. You may dig out from your first trip below the curve, through heroic spending, horrific struggle and frenzied, unmanaged change.

Dip below the Change/Tech Curve a second, or worse, a third time, and your survival chances approach zero. Masaaki Imai, father of the concept of "kaizen" continuous improvement, summarizes your possible situation this way. "Without continuous improvement," Imai says, "your organization's name may no longer be in the telephone book."

Try phoning someone at Lehman Bros., Circuit City, or Oldsmobile. Sorry. No one home.

It's all about the change you want at your organization-managed or chaotic, constant or periodic, routine or frenzied.

If you want...