Natural Business Transformation
“Lead as though you have no power” – Taiichi Ohno
The secret to successful business improvement is to work with human nature
Did you know that business improvement, lean initiatives or change management programs have failure rates as high as 85%? And all because managers fail to adopt a method of natural business transformation. Simply put, the fact is most managers tend to go about business improvement in a way that works against human nature. This means, that the usual management approach creates stress and provokes employee resistance as well as confusion and chaos.
So, the key message is, that if you have to make major changes in a business, then the best way is to adopt new ways of seeing, thinking and acting. The motto is that you can’t solve a problem with the same type of thinking that created it. So, just like any other complex process, your change initiative requires the correct training and guidance for you to make the transition.
And this is where Hoshin Kanri helps.
The Toyota way to business success uses natural business transformation
Hoshin Kanri gives you a natural approach that helps you achieve consistent success with business improvement initiatives. In essence, Hoshin Kanri guarantees successful change for one overriding reason. And that is that Hoshin Kanri exploits the instinctive way people excel at working in groups.
Using this collaborative principle, Toyota originally developed Hoshin Kanri back in the 1960s. Since then, leading manufacturers such as Sony, Intel and Hewlett Packard have adopted Hoshin Kanri to plan change and implement policy. But the really good news is that Hoshin Kanri is not just for the big players. If you are running a small enterprise it is just as applicable to you as well.
Why does Hoshin Kanri work so well?
TBD’s Hoshin Kanri is an all-embracing business operating system delivered by a highly experienced coach. One key aspect is that Hoshin Kanri involves everyone in your organization. As a result, the system embeds new ways of seeing things, new ways of problem-solving and new ways of thinking into the very fabric of your business. The effect on employee engagement is dramatic.
Hoshin Kanri’s planning system mobilizes and integrates every business process, sub-system, function and department in your improvement initiative. And this results in the alignment of your diverse resources and activities with your longer-term goals. As a direct consequence you save time, money and energy getting you where you want to go.
Hoshin Kanri is self-funding
With TBD’s Hoshin Kanri system you get a highly sophisticated and user friendly business improvement process. Not only that, but Hoshin Kanri’s standardization makes it ready to bolt into place and make use of on day one.
In this sense, natural business transformation with Hoshin Kanri is always self-funding. Effectively you make money from the direct savings and opportunities that arise from the improvement planning.
Three key benefits of Hoshin Kanri’s natural business transformation
- Most importantly, the usual outcome is a major hike in operating profit. And this leads to a substantial increase in the net worth of an enterprise
- But the improved profit does not just spring out of nowhere. Hoshin Kanri accelerates business growth by aligning improvements with daily operational activity and long term strategy. In turn, these benefits lead to huge efficiency savings and the better retention of satisfied customers.
- Last but by no means least, team planning reduces the stress inherent in change initiatives. This benefit applies as much to senior management as to everyone else in the enterprise. As a result of a low stress environment, employees become far more engaged in the improvement process. The knock on effect is a surge in creative problem-solving, experiential learning, mutual cooperation and coherent planning.
“We’ve achieved more changes in six weeks with these team planning workshops than I’ve seen in twenty years of my time here.” Dave Medhurst Projects Coordinator Steelfields Concrete Batching Plant Manufacturer.
What if you could raise productivity 57%? – Read case study …
For improvement to be transformational it has to be holistic
One important principle is that if one part of a system is left defective then the whole system is compromised. After all, any system is only as strong as its weakest element.
This is why Hoshin Kanri’s protocols and procedures work to improve every aspect of your organization ALL AT THE SAME TIME. First off, Hoshin Kanri planning identifies strategic improvement opportunities. It also exposes hidden obstacles or threats to successful change. This is the Reality Check. The next phase designs appropriate countermeasures and constructs a powerful road map to plan and implement them (The Management Action Plan or MAP). This MAP orchestrates a wide range of improvement projects sometimes as many as 50 or so at once. Collectively, these projects yield whole-scale improvement.
To a lot of traditional executives, attempting so many improvements all at the same time sounds ambitious, if not actually impossible. But experience with Hoshin Kanri proves that this approach has real advantages over the conventional way of managing change. What we find is that the accumulative effect of large numbers of simultaneously applied improvement projects captures results that are simply unimaginable with other approaches.
The strength and consistency of this improvement system and its ability to work with human nature are the reasons why TBD Hoshin Kanri programmes achieve an estimated 30 : 1 ROI on client investment.
What if you could raise your profits fourfold? – Read case study …
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the art of rapid business transformation’
Or contact Jeremy Old for an informal, no-obligation chat on 0800 0945 819.
Email: Jeremy@teambusinessdevelopment.co.uk.
Jeremy Old has twenty-five years experience as an independent management coach, specializing in SMEs and non-profit organisations. Equally important he has facilitated 56, Hoshin Kanri assignments across a wide range of industry sectors and finds that the system yields consistent success. “The reason is to do with the standardization of the process. After all, no one would seriously consider controlling their company finances without a tried and tested accounting system. In much the same way, Hoshin Kanri supplies a tried and tested management operating system for CEOs to work with.”
In addition to his coaching work, Jeremy is also author of ‘Reinventing Management Thinking; using science to liberate the human spirit’. His book explains the psychological reasons why collaborative management systems such as Hoshin Kanri are so much more successful than command and control methods. Jeremy is qualified to MBA level, with a post-graduate diploma in psychotherapy.