Natural Business Transformation
“Lead as though you have no power” – Taiichi Ohno
The secret to successful business improvement is to work with the grain of human nature not against it.
Business improvement, lean initiatives or change management programs have failure rates as high as 70% to 85%. Although this may look implausible, from the perspective of modern psychology, these stats make sense. The problem is that, as managers, we tend to go about business improvement and change the wrong way. What you need to accelerate improvement is a more natural business transformation and this is where Hoshin Kanri comes in.
Just like any other complex process, you will provoke failure if you go about change without training and guidance. After all, give a trumpet to somebody who has learned to play and you hear music. But, give one to somebody who has never had a lesson and you just get a rude noise.
The Toyota way to business success
With the right level of expertise and commitment Hoshin Kanri helps you achieve consistent success with business improvement initiatives. Hoshin Kanri can guarantee successful change for one overriding reason. And that is that the system works with human nature. By that we mean 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 been using 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. This results in complete alignment of your diverse resources and activities with your longer-term goals. Saving you 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.
The whole process is self-funding from the direct savings and opportunities that arise from the improvement planning. This is because Hoshin Kanri gives you a whole range of benefits. Lets look at three:
Three key benefits
- 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 and value does not just spring out of nowhere. Hoshin Kanri accelerates business growth by aligning improvements with daily operational activity and long term strategy. These benefits lead in turn to huge efficiency savings and the better retention of satisfied customers.
- Last but by no means least, the collaborative planning reduces the stress inherent in change initiatives. This benefit applies as much to the senior management as well as to everyone else in the organization. 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 sophisticated 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 and 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 is the mechanism that orchestrates a wide range of improvement projects sometimes as many as 50 or so at once. These projects collectively 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 of experience as an independent management coach specializing in small and mid-sized enterprises and non-profit organisations. During this time, he has facilitated 54, Hoshin Kanri assignments across a wide range of industry sectors. He finds that the system always yields consistent success. “The reason is to do with the standardization of the process. No one would seriously consider controlling the financial side of a company without a tried and tested accounting system. In much the same way Hoshin Kanri supplies a tried and tested template for CEOs to work with when handling change or managing growth.”
In addition to his coaching work, Jeremy is also author of ‘Reinventing Management Thinking; using science to liberate the human spirit’. In his book Jeremy explains the psychological reasons why collaborative management systems such as Hoshin Kanri are so much more successful than conventional top down command and control methods. Jeremy is qualified to MBA level, with a post-graduate diploma in psychotherapy.