Better Makes Us Best

I do too much writing about uncertainty, lean practices and methods, and the linguistic action perspective and not enough writing about what we find is the most difficult aspect of lean. It is Womack's and Jones' fifth lean principle: pursuing perfection.

Invariably I visit companies who have adopted a lean approach to project delivery, but they haven't adopted any formal practices of continuous improvement. Seth Godin writes Slowly I Turned…Step by Step…Inch by Inch… about the difficulty as being endemic to American business and our culture in general:

We need to stop shopping for lightning bolts. The way out of our paralysis is simpler than that: It's about thinking small and thinking gradual.

We are programmed to look for the quick fix, the overnight diet, the winning strategy.

Womack and Jones will tell you while flow and pull are the distinguishing characteristics of the production activity, pursuing perfection is the general orientation that separates the Toyotas of the world from everyone else. Seth puts it this way:

If every element of an organization gets a little better every day, then that organization will become unstoppable. An organization that builds that kind of momentum will soon evolve into a market leader.

Jim Collins confirms that in his study reported in Good to Great. He says that breakthroughs come from consistently building up effort over long periods of time.

None of these authors are saying something new. Who knows, we might even find a Ben Franklin quote on the subject. What these authors fail to help with is how to create a habit of pursuing perfection. Seth tells us:

The truth is, gradual change is challenging and hard: challenging, because the people around you are demanding something great right now, and hard, because gradual requires the faith to know that your hard work is worth the investment.

So how can we pull this off?

The best advice I've read was from Dr. John Psarouthakis. Dr. John, as his employees called him, is a Greek immigrant who got an MIT education and later a PhD. After a successful career he went on to found a series of companies that became JP Enterprises. Those companies provide parts to the automotive industry. Dr. John wrote the book Better Makes Us Best. (It is now out of print, but can be found on Half.com and Amazon used books.) He describes an approach that I'll characterize as intense engagement. Dr. John encourages all staff to align their actions everyday with the mission of the company making it their personal goal to do better today than they did yesterday. He goes on to describe how management must shift their behavior and the formal systems to support the goal.

We can thank Seth Godin for being the most recent person to call attention to the pursuit of perfection as the source for long term competitiveness. Now, let's take that advice and build practices for continuous improvement in our project settings.

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