Building the Fit Organization: Six Core Principles for Making Your Company Stronger, Faster, and More Competitive

Winner of The Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award!  Everyone knows that in order to reach optimum levels of health, you have to exercise—and that you have to keep at it, day after day after day. No big secret here.   It’s the same with process improvement, and, specifically, lean processes. Everything there is to know about Lean has been revealed. Countless books, articles, and seminars provide business leaders all the information they need to understand how lean works and how effective it can be when fully implemented. Again, not a secret. Why, then, do companies invariably fail in their pursuit of operational excellence? The same reason people fail to trim fat through exercise. They don’t do it. They try to squeeze it into their schedule; they don’t make it part of their schedule. And, inevitably, it becomes less of a priority. In the same vein, too many business leaders see process improvement as a project, something separate from the more “pressing” goals of profits and growth.  That’s where they go wrong. And that’s where Building the Fit Organization comes in. In this practical, hands-on guide Markovitz walks you step by step through the process of making lean as intrinsic to your company as the pursuit of profits. You will learn how to make an unshakeable commitment to increasing the value provided by doing the right work in the right way with continuous monitoring of processes and structured coaching for everyone.  You don’t need another book about lean. What you need to learn is how to make process improvement your company’s purpose. Like a serious athlete, you’re warmed up. You know what lean is and how it can help your organization. Now it’s time to perform. Building the Fit Organization is the next step to creating a company that can compete on the toughest of playing fields.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Commit to Improvement 9 2 Increase Value, Don’t Cut Costs 33 3 Think Horizontally 53 4 Standard Work 77 5 Visual Management 111 6 The Coaching Triangle 133 Afterword 155 Appendix 1: Organizational Fitness Self-Assessment 159 Appendix 2: Resources 167 Notes 175 Index 183

About the Author :
Dan Markovitz makes companies faster, more flexible, and more productive through the application of lean principles. He is a faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute and a lecturer at the Fisher College of Business. He holds a Stanford MBA, and received a Shingo Research Award for his first book, A Factory of One.