Dan Jones never ceases to amaze me with his insight. Below is a podcast excerpt from our upcoming discussion that will be posted this week about a new book he co-authored, The Lean Strategy: Using Lean to Create Competitive Advantage, Unleash Innovation, and Deliver Sustainable Growth. I not only enjoyed the reading of this book but have been putting it to actual use in my work. After I read a good book, I typically ask myself, what am I going to do to differently on Monday Morning as a result of it. I posted this work on Saturday: Using The Lean Strategy for the Lean People Development Summit.
Several years ago, I did a podcast with Dan Jones and it still is one of my favorites. The audio is attached to this post at the bottom but the original post and transcript are directly below:
Podcast: The Future of Lean with Dan Jones
Transcription of the Original Podcast: Dan Jones on Lean
An excerpt from this week’s podcast:
Joe: One of the big terms used today is Agile. Everybody is agile. One of the things agile people talk about is complexity. It is often said that Lean can’t survive and prosper within complexity. But to me, it sounds like the teamwork that we describe in the cross-functional teams is things that have been part of Lean from day one. In your description of just-in-time, it was a fantastic description of that process.
Dan Jones: I have been listening to all of the founders of the software development movement, Agile and so on, one by one in the Paris IT Conferences. It strikes me, all of them, have actually lost their inspiration for Agile, Scrum, DevOps, and Extreme Programming. With all of that, they start to borrow from Lean, Toyota for their processes in their work.
A lot of the Agile movement is absolutely confluent with Lean. And indeed, Lean is a way to create an organization in itself is Agile if you like. It is an organization that can adapt to changing circumstances, and it can tailor products and services to individual types and customers. It can also cope with the introduction of new technologies much faster.
The big advantage of continuous improvement in both product and service development is that you can feed forward the lessons much faster in a series of experiments and more rapid series of experiments. That creates new products and services. So, cumulative iteration is actually the foundation for the scaling up of a new idea through repeated experiments. It’s taking the continuous improvement idea into the customer relationship with the product development folks. That actually turns product development from a project based activity into a continuous stream of creating new products and that is exactly the world that the agile folks come out of. Agile and lean actually are going to come together. It’s just that we don’t use the same language, we come from different places, but there is a huge amount of overlap. And there’s on the agile side I would say this is still a fairly shallow understanding of the deeper aspects of the Lean management system and we’re trying to explain some of those in this book to them as well.
Dan Jones is a management thought leader and advisor on applying lean, process thinking to every type of business across the world. He is the founding Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy www.leanuk.org in the UK, dedicated to pushing forward the frontiers of lean thinking and helping others with its implementation. He is also the co-author of the original books on Lean, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production and Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated