Lean Enterprise Institute

Mark Reich traveled to China last week to speak at the China Lean Summit on Hoshin Kanri.

At the event, organizers surprised him with a copy of his book, Managing on Purpose, translated into Chinese.

Two decades of lean thinking, now in the hands of practitioners in a new language and a new context. That moment is a good reminder of why this work matters: the principles translate because the challenges do too.

Whether you're working on strategy in Shanghai or Chicago, the gap between intent and ex*****on looks remarkably similar.

Managing on Purpose is available in English, grab your copy at https://hubs.li/Q04lpZgV0

What Is the Real Work of Management?

It's not budgets, compliance, or performance reviews. It's creating purpose, designing better processes, and developing people.

Most managers know this. Yet they spend their time firefighting, solving problems themselves, and managing by reaction. The gap between knowing and doing is where organizations lose capability.

Building a management system that actually does this work requires discipline. It requires daily routines where problems surface and get addressed. It requires coaching people through problems instead of solving for them. It requires connecting what teams do every day to what the organization is trying to achieve.

This is what separates organizations that improve sustainably from those that don't.

The Lean Management Program teaches leaders how to build this system. Daily Management, Hoshin Kanri, and A3 thinking aren't training topics. They're the practices that make the real work of management possible.

Discover how to strengthen your management system: https://hubs.li/Q04l4YD30

Your lean transformation may be solving the wrong problem.

Most improvement work starts by mapping value streams, identifying waste, and fixing what exists. That approach works. But it starts from a premise that limits how far you can go: value is already defined.

The LPPD community has understood for decades that 70% of an organization's costs, quality, and delivery capability are locked in at the design stage. The same logic applies to enterprise transformation. Before asking how to improve the way value is delivered, leaders need to ask what value should be.

Eric Ethington's new article applies the discipline of product and process development to the challenge of organizational transformation. The HR succession planning example makes the framework concrete and actionable.

https://hubs.li/Q04ktJJl0

Most improvement work operates in the 30%.

The other 70% — costs, quality, delivery capability — is locked in at the design stage. By the time the improvement team arrives, the most consequential decisions have already been made.

LPPD thinking asks organizations to work on the 70%. To treat transformation as a design problem. To define value before committing to how it will be delivered.

Eric Ethington makes the case in his latest article:
https://hubs.li/Q04ktvbv0