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Thursday, March 14, 2013

Principles of Lean from FastCap


Building a Lean culture should be personal and unique to your company and people. The important thing is that you are committed to growing your team on a daily basis and everything else will take care of itself. FastCap, an exemplary Lean organization, shared the principles that helped to develop, support and build their Lean culture.  This can serve as a lesson for all of us as we transform our businesses.

FastCap’s 21 Principles

1) The purpose of FastCap is to Grow People, uncover hidden potential and help people become the Best Problem solvers in the World.

2) FastCap is always looking for a way to make things Faster, Simpler and Safer.

3) Winston Churchill said these words: “Action This Day”.

4) Whenever we walk away from something, we should:
“Leave It Better Than You Found It”.

5) Our job title is Process Engineer. Your key responsibility is to Improve the Process.

6) Everything of value comes after much hard work.

7) Each of us have an immediate goal by the end of the day to: Make Two seconds worth of improvements in everything we do.

8) We always Use a Person’s Name when addressing each other in our facility and at least 2 times in the first minute of every phone conversation.

9) Enjoy your day to the fullest by doing the Hard thing First.

10) If we want to know what the real issue is, we must Ask why 5 times.

11) When there is a problem, we should always: Go and See, don’t just talk about the problem, experience and look at it: Action this Day!

12) What must we do if we want to understand our actions: Hansei, reflect on what we did and did we achieve the goal and how can we improve.

13) Real learning comes when you are proficient at asking questions and the answer is a well thought out question.

14) Life is all about people – how much success you have in life will be determined by your understanding this principle.

15) What did Bob Taylor say? Anytime someone takes responsible for more than just themselves, they are destined to be successful.

16) "I'll trade all the intelligence in the world for someone with vision". -Paul's Dad

17) Toyota never attempts to improve anything unless they can cut the waste in half.

18) Hold each other accountable.

19) Your success at FastCap will be determined by the fact that you are Never Satisfied with the state of your performance and are Relentless about Improvement.

20) We have learned that Toyota’s success is the result of the relentless pursuit of Building a Culture and that’s what applying these principles will achieve.

21) Andy Stanley – “Making a Vision”.

Everyday at FastCap they focus on an improvement that has been made. The concept of reviewing an improvement everyday comes from the idea that if you want to make a culture stick you must do the following 3 things:

Create an expectation: FastCap's expectation is that everyone makes a 2 second improvement everyday.

Inspect the expectation: This is done in the first hour of everyday during the Morning Improvement walk where they inspect the improvements that every team member has made.

Reinforce the expectation: This is done by showing everyone videos of the improvements being made on a daily basis. Note: in the beginning thye reviewed improvements by walking from department to department. This method may be effective for smaller companies, however as they grew it was more effective to make videos of the improvements and show them in the morning meeting.

If you would like to learn more about FastCap and it's transformation into one of the best Lean examples in modern times you should read Paul Aker's book "2 Second Lean". Paul (CEO of FastCap) shares his personal Lean journey which serves as a recipe transforming your organization.



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