Four Dilberts

As The Nob counts down in Dilberts to the publication date of Employee X's pulsating new book, Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale, a tantalizing excerpt may be in order:

Yet, with all that and under the regime of standard work, within the purview of visual management (and with my own executive-approved project suggestions for the companyidling somewhere in somebody’s queue), I commenced serious work on this book. At my workstation. In plain-sight. All during the newly imposed standard work hours. With WTF placing mind-numbing emphasis on tracking every working hour, with charts galore tracking every employee with a dizzying array of arrows and stars and bars, with a pervasive and oppressive company push to get everyone on the Lean transformation bus, I sat undisturbed documenting much of what was going wrong with the process. 


According to the standard of work elements detailed for each of our leaders up the chain of command, in the time I spent writing this book I should have been visited dozens of times to be asked what I was working on…how I was progressing…was I having any problems. Just one gembawalk should have easily raised five “why” questions. Like, why was I busily working on my personal iPad while my company iMac with its 16-inch monitor sat on my desk mostly idle for three months? Why did the vaunted Lean process allow me to not only fall through the cracks but virtually disappear from sight? Why did someone decide that Lean standards would be further advanced by leaving me with nothing to do rather than putting me to work on approved projects with long-term benefits to the company? Why did someone decide that it would be a good idea to have one of WE’s most vocal critics of the Lean transformation sit without assigned work for more than 500 hours? Why, after intensive visual management and standard of work training, did our department management return to our “factory floor” so utterly blind or oblivious to the problem it was creating?