The Environment of Lean and Rowe

David Kasprzak, of the blog, My Flexible Pencil discussed the intersection of Lean and ROWE in a Business901 podcast. ROWE is a concept developed by Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler, co-authors of the book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution. ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment.

Joe: Well, I think the interesting thing about Lean is you look at the process side. When you think about it, even processes are still about the people. It’s still about the person. It’s really what ROWE specifically addresses, because it is about the person, right?

David: Yes, it is. What I find really interesting with the two, and I know Lean purists don’t like this term, but in Lean implementations, I keep seeing, and I’ve experienced a little bit myself where they introduce a bunch of tools. The tools get introduced, and they take hold and you see some operating efficiencies. You get a little bit better effectiveness. Because of that the business wants to grow, and the idea expands, and then at some hoped-for point in the future you get to this culture change where people at all levels are really engaged and perfectly aligned. What I see in ROWE is, let’s start with culture change. Let’s get those people engaged and aligned.

Once we begin with what people’s intrinsic motivations are wrapped around that start to see improvements in their own time and thereby improvements in business performance that makes them want to investigate more tools for increased efficiency. It’s almost like they’re going in different directions. One says tools first to get to the culture. The other says culture first to get to the tools.

That to me, if the two of them, if we could find out where the common ground is and how they intertwine, you’d have something extremely powerful, because you’d get past the Lean problem with getting the culture change, and the ROWE problem with getting to increase levels of efficiency across the enterprise.

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