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“Hey Jaded Julie. Do you know what inertia is?”
“Sure. It’s my husband sitting on the couch watching a sporting event on the television.”
“The dictionary says it’s ‘the resistance or disinclination to motion, action, or change’.”
“That’s him all right.”
“Today we’re going to talk about inertia—specifically about the CEO pushing a flywheel.”
“Golly, Curmudge. A couple of weeks ago we had him driving a bus and getting the right people on it and the wrong people off. Haven’t we given him enough headaches without adding a hernia from pushing a flywheel?”
“Don’t worry, Julie. Our story will just be an allegory.”
“An alle…what? Oh well. It will probably just be a symbolic narrative. So where did this flywheel stuff come from, anyway?”
“Jim Collins and Quint Studer both use flywheels to illustrate the reality that one can’t jump from bad to good or good to great in one dramatic leap. A slow, relentless buildup must precede the acceleration to operational excellence that we are seeking.”
“That makes sense, but is it accurately depicted by a flywheel?”
“I wondered that too, so I built an imaginary flywheel, created some sample data, and grabbed an old textbook to see if classical physics supported Jim Collin’s ‘hockey stick’ figures. My ‘flywheel’ is a limestone grindstone mounted horizontally on a vertical axis.”
“Just like in Biblical times when people or animals pushed the stone around and around.”
“Right, Julie. But in our story, it is our hardworking CEO starting to push the stone all by himself. The speed of the stone’s rotation represents the organization’s progress toward greatness. Assuming the bearing is frictionless, the CEO’s relentless pushing builds up momentum slowly.”
“Of course when the bearing is old and rusty, the lone pusher gets a hernia.”
“The breakthrough occurs when the CEO gets more people to help push, with their number, in my example, doubling every five minutes. A plot of speed of rotation vs. time then looks like a hockey stick, so a flywheel is an acceptable model. The dramatic bend upward depends on more and more people joining the effort. That’s what happens in a real organization as more of the staff realize that a Lean culture is their goal. Take a look at the plot of my model.”
“Your values for rotational speed are awfully high, Curmudge, but I suppose that’s because frictionless flywheels aren’t very realistic.”
“We might view the unavoidable friction in a real flywheel as representing those people who persistently resist change. If we don’t continue to push, friction and the skeptics will take over. The plot will take a nosedive, and our Lean transformation will become just another ‘program of the month’.”
"Thanks for the flywheel physics, Curmudge, but what must a real CEO do to turn the corner and move her organization toward excellence?”
“Our story will be continued, Julie. Meanwhile, please return my physics book, and I’ll put it back on the shelf to collect more dust.”
“See you in class, Professor.”
Affinity’s Kaizen Curmudgeon
“Well, Curmudge, in our last conversation we hired the CEO, and he loaded the bus with the right people. Are we there yet?”
“No Jaded Julie, we’re not there yet. The bus needs a navigator.”
“Why so? The CEO was supposed to know where to go and how to get there. Is she lost already?”
“Julie, the road to a Lean transformation has more potholes than an Appleton street in the springtime. We need a navigator who has been over this route many times. He is a very important person in guiding us to a Lean culture.”
“If he is very important in Lean, he probably has a Japanese name. Okay Curmudge, I’m ready. Lay it on me.”
“The navigator is our sensei. To the Japanese, a sensei is an honored teacher who has mastered his subject. Our sensei teaches our top management all about Lean. He also instructs the people on our staff who will spend full time on our Lean effort. Sometimes the sensei is a full-time employee like John Karras, the COO in Pascal Dennis’s book, Getting the Right Things Done. More often he is a consultant who comes to visit as needed.”
“So what do our full-time staff people do after receiving their Lean instruction?”
“They are called Lean facilitators, and they teach and coach our middle managers. Then they aid the middle managers in teaching their own people about Lean. Quint Studer calls health care transformation zealots who make a difference in the lives of others ‘Fire Starters’. That’s how Lean and Studer’s complement to Lean are spread throughout an organization.”
“Curmudge, are you a sensei or a Lean facilitator or a firebug?”
“Fire Starter, Julie. And I’m none of the above. These people receive lots of training and work very hard. A sensei is pretty expensive. I’m self-taught, a volunteer, and do this for fun.”
“Curmudge, you can be my sensei.”
“Thank you, Julie. That’s very touching. I guess it’s okay for a fictional nurse to have a fictional sensei.”
Affinity’s Kaizen Curmudgeon
“Today, Julie, we are going to imagine that you and I are an organization’s Board of Directors or Board of Trustees. Our immediate task is to hire a CEO.”
“Not a problem, Curmudge. Everyone with small children knows how to play ‘Let’s Pretend.’ But isn’t that a bit of a stretch—you and me on the Board?”
“Julie, except for the lessons we teach and the authors we quote, everything in this blog is fiction.”
“I can relate to that. If we are going to pretend, we might as well enjoy it. You can be a hard-nosed, successful business person, and I’ll be a well-to-do philanthropist. But I’m already confused. I thought our starting point was going to be an organization in big trouble. You have Collins’s book, Good to Great, on your desk. Shouldn’t you be reading somebody’s Bad to Average?”
“You know me. I don’t have time to stop at ‘average’; we’re going all the way to ‘great’.”
“Hoo-ah, Curmudge. So back to our Board meeting. I believe the person we want to hire will know what to do, how to do it, and have a track record of having done so in the past.”
“That’s it in a nutshell, Julie. You’re my kind of don’t-beat-around-the-bush Board member. According to research by Jim Collins and his team, there are a few more qualities we should seek in the CEO who will lead us to greatness. Most importantly, the CEO should be a so-called Level 5 leader.”
“You are suggesting that there is a five-level hierarchy of executive capabilities, with Level 5 at the top. I bet that Collins drew them in the shape of a triangle or pyramid. One can’t be an author if you can’t draw a pyramid.”
“Level 5 leadership is comprised of humility and will. Although Level 5 leaders are extremely ambitious, their ambition is channeled toward the institution, not themselves. They possess an unwavering resolve to do what must be done to make the organization great.”
“Curmudge, if humility is essential, the flamboyant types one reads about in The Wall Street Journal and those with nicknames like ‘Chainsaw’ probably don’t make it into Level 5.”
“That’s for sure, but Level 5’s can’t be pushovers. Let’s focus on their ‘resolve to do what must be done.’ According to Collins, the first thing our leader will have to do is ‘get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it.’ If our fictional organization is really in deep trouble, this process may be a bit unsettling. Nevertheless, doing things in the right order is essential; first the right people, then the right direction. As Collins said, ‘Great vision without great people is irrelevant’.”
“Okay, Curmudge, we’ve found and hired a Level 5 CEO. I guess we can stop pretending that we are the Board and I can open my eyes now. Oo! What happened to my designer clothing and high heels? Here I am back in my blue scrubs and my Superclogs™. So what’s next?”
“Now that the right people are on board—and hopefully most were already present—we’ll talk about the CEO’s next steps. Are you with me?”
“As you wish, Sir.”
“At your service, Madam.”
Affinity’s Kaizen Curmudgeon
“Don’t you mean ‘good to great’, Curmudge?”
“No, Julie. Good to Great is Jim Collins’s book. We’re going to start by considering organizations that are farther in the hole than those that he studied. Recall our February 18 posting where we listed a lot of aspects of a command-and-control culture? That’s our starting point.”
“And I suppose that our end point is an organization with all those great attributes that we listed on February 25. So all one has to do is read the books you recommended in January and do what they say. Pretty easy! Case closed! So what are we going to talk about next?”
“Julie, you are beset by grandiose visions.”
“I think you are saying that it’s not going to happen, right?”
“What have we been talking about since last May? Lean and how difficult it is to achieve and maintain, that’s what. We’ve been using a fairly broad brush and talking about the organizational aspects of Lean. Now we are going to bore a bit deeper and look at Lean from its personal side. Let’s call our topic Personal Aspects of Lean. We’ll cover the CEO, middle management, nurses, and maybe even volunteers. Are you with me?”
“How can I object? Those are your fingers on the keys.”
“Before we weigh anchor, there’s one more book to add to your reading list. It’s The Baptist Health Care Journey to Excellence by Al Stubblefield.”
“Thanks, Curmudge. I’ll read it on my next flight to Paris.”
“Shall we start at the top of the organization and talk about the CEO? Then gravity will carry us downward to the rest of the staff.”
“I’m for that. It’s going to be a lot easier than climbing up Liker’s ‘4P’ Toyota Way pyramid, especially in the winter.”
“Okay, Julie. So what qualities should the CEO of a Lean organization possess?”
“I suspect that she should look like a CEO and be able to walk on water.”
“I doubt that either of those qualities is in his job description. By the way, what’s this she stuff? Aren’t most CEOs in health care men? For ease of reading, let’s use ‘he’ for top management and ‘she’ for nursing management even though we are really thinking ‘he or she.’ That should look better than having a lot of ‘he/she’s’ cluttering up our text.”
“That’s okay, Curmudge. I used ‘she’ just to see if your hearing aid was working.”
“Now about your ‘walk on water’ response: Think back to our postings on October 29 and November 12. Remember John Kotter’s and Mitch McCrimmon’s definitions of management and leadership?”
“Of course I do. And Father Hesburgh’s admonition to CEOs that they not blow an uncertain trumpet.”
“So here is a critical difference between the role of the CEO in a Lean organization vs. command-and-control. Under command-and-control, the CEO is the big boss manager. In a Lean organization, the CEO is the main leader. As Kotter said, the leader ‘defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen.’ We’ll talk more about how he—and sometimes she—does that in our next couple of conversations.”
“Okay. Lead on, Curmudge.”
“Yes, boss.”
Affinity’s Kaizen Curmudgeon
