Tonianne DeMaria Barry and Jim Benson’s wrote Personal Kanban it seem like a decade ago. I asked Jim during a podcast, “Do you think that Personal Kanban and the book has identified the both of you as people from this time forward?”
Jim Benson: Yes. You know, process is all evolution. Living is, we’re always evolving into new ideas, new processes, and new thoughts. Tonianne and I have been becoming increasingly interested in the interplay between happiness and successful business. Some of the elements that drive happiness in business are clarity, respect, and the ability to actually act and make decisions. And, what we’ve been finding with our clients is that, if we come in and we help them build what ?? Lean guys are going to call it Kaizen culture, but if we just actually call it a healthy working environment, the people naturally solve issues and problems on their own. The people who were previously labeled as poor performers, underperformers, underachievers, wastes of space, suddenly step up and just start knocking balls out of the park.
It has been phenomenal for us to watch the clients that we have been blessed to have reacted so positively to these very lightweight techniques. Because it’s not like we’re coming in and saying, you guys have to do these five things, and you’ve got to do this, and you have to do that. We seriously are just coming in and instilling visualizing work, limiting work in progress and putting bugs in their ears too, you have this problem. How might you go about solving that? And then we will work through that.
What’s most gratifying is, when we leave and then we come back three months later, people are seriously running up to us in the halls saying, you’ve got see what I did after you left, because it’s made such a difference. We just go and we see what they did, on their own..not the experts telling them to, but just what they did, because they’re conscientious, wonderful human beings, because they were just given the permission to act. That’s where I think that, for us, is the investigation of how people work and how people live.
Read or listen to the entire podcast/transcription: Interview with Personal Kanban Co-Authors
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