Lean-Trained Executives Fast-Track Successful Transitions to Green
Experience with Lean can provide a needed framework for culture change. 

By Adam Zak, founder and managing director of Adam Zak Executive Search

IBM’s recent launch of a “Green Sigma” Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) consulting service underscores a growing realization that operational excellence principles and practices can give direction to a rapid transition toward Green management. More and more business leaders agree that shifting to Green management is necessary and can be profitable when done properly. They also agree that Lean, Lean Six Sigma, and other continuous improvement (CI) strategies can be applied to integrated management systems as a framework for shifting to Green. 

Lean-trained executives have the experience, vision, and discipline needed to fast-track transition and real cultural change at companies driving their own Green revolutions. A new type of Green-focused executive -- frequently called the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) -- is appearing at companies large and small. Most of these firms have some sort of CI initiative already in place but find the CSO’s role expanding and evolving to merge production, risk management, compliance, marketing, and social responsibility as they impact the entire enterprise. As reported in the recruiting newsletter The Executive Grapevine (March 6, 2008), “Recruiting for high-level jobs is more difficult than filling the gap of technical skills and scientific talent.” Executives with expertise in Lean CI systems bring hands-on experience gained from a decade or more of development at some of the world’s most successful companies, including Toyota, Danaher, United Technologies, Johnson Controls, Whirlpool and others. 

In Consulting Magazine, April 29, 2008, George Pohle, vice president and global leader of the Business Strategy Consulting Practice at IBM, said two-thirds of business executives view sustainability as a growth opportunity as opposed to relating only to regulatory compliance or philanthropy. Welcome news, for sure. 

Green Is Not A Fad

Like Lean, Green management purports that reducing consumption and preventing waste is more efficient and effective than subsequent mitigation. Global Lean leaders have seen first-hand how CI across the value stream can capture competitive advantage. Lean’s focus on reducing input cost, waste, and risk; promoting line-level innovation and professional development; and building proactive environmental, health and safety (EHS) strategy mirrors the triple-bottom-line impact Green seeks to generate. Add marketing and social responsibility to the mix, and the result is a Lean + Green management strategy that brings PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) principles that many “Green-only” transition managers often don’t realize they’re missing. 

Lean systems deliver Green outcomes not simply by replacing legacy factors with lower-carbon or recyclable inputs, but by preventing unnecessary inputs and procedures altogether. Instead of reducing waste, Lean (done right, of course) prevents waste in the first place. Our new generation of Green executives will have to look beyond engineering and the supply chain to find creative ways to keep costs from entering the value stream at all. Lean + Green provides an analytical tool that can help reveal unexpected cost exposure.  

Lean Unifies Green Transition

Viewed from the bottom up, Lean is the culture driver often overlooked when Green is implemented by trial and error — a unifying program that makes transition consistent across traditional operational silos while maximizing return on the most productive yet expensive input of all, human resource. Learning from shop floor (gemba) experience has long been a prized component of Lean-Sigma-operational excellence programs and coincides perfectly with the social responsibility image that made Green desirable in the first place. And in cases where sustainable materials are still cost-prohibitive compared with legacy inputs, simply striving for Green result can deliver value as employees feel they’re contributing to an evolving, improving process and outcome. 

Next Steps — Next Innovations 

So what are the next steps for implementing Green in your service, manufacturing, or intellectual product enterprises, and what innovations are evolving from Green transitions across industries?  

Leaders are revisiting the operational excellence initiatives that focused on input and process efficiency before Green became a growing concern.  

• Traced back through Toyota’s explosive growth in the 1980s to Henry Ford –the architect of mass production efficiency — Lean systems provide a unified, tested structure for competitive modern innovators

• Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) members are synthesizing a formal Lean + Green strategy, and that program will transfer beyond manufacturing. “Growing evidence, spurred by case studies, academic research, and government programs, shows that by combining lean and green practices, companies can potentially save millions of dollars a year…” (Oracle Information InDepth 2007).

• More and more keynotes, conference presenters and authors are demonstrating ways Lean + Green can create synergy in every industry cluster.

• A unifying thread is emerging: Starting at the C-suite level with Lean-trained executive talent is critical in getting the most out of Green transition. The new generation of Green leadership will recruit CSOs who can maximize operational excellence with the structure and discipline learned from Lean.

Ultimately, engineers, site managers and line-level team members will implement Green transition on the shop floor, R&D lab, and corporate office, but out-Greening the competition is going to require more. Transition without unifying vision simply transfers waste from carbon byproducts to wasted talent, enterprise, and potential.  

Darrell Rigby, head of Bain & Company’s Global Retail Practice advised in Consulting Magazine’s April 29, 2008, edition, “Almost always the answer is to eliminate waste. It’s always a good payback and usually has the best return on investment for firms.” 

Take a lesson from the largest consulting firm in the world. If IBM is fielding a venture that specializes in economics of conservation analysis and CSR, and that firm drives Lean operational excellence throughout its own management structure (actually practicing what it preaches), this truly underscores the premise voiced here: Lean is Green, and the two are almost synonymous. Except that one is an outcome and the other is the means to achieving it.