Once you look past the Consultant-Speak aka mumbo-jumbo and the excessive emphasis on KPIs, a lot of Lean really boils down to common sense and good business practices.

Far too many organizations end up calling themselves lean, when they haven’t done much beyond a switch to management by numbers. Bonus idiot points for places who treat every blip in the daily numbers as the beginning of a catastrophe rather than looking at the trend across a week or a month.

You’re spot on about the effect this has on the employees. Everyone quickly figures out what the big wigs “see” vs what’s not even on the radar. A lot of the important intangibles are not measured simply because it’s too difficult to properly measure them. Those tend to go straight out the window when things get busy.

A while back, I’ve read an anecdote from something that happened at the Tesla plant here in Fremont. A small piece of dirt or debris got stuck in a panel press, which caused every part to come out with a dent. When the operators reported the issue to the supervisor, he basically said “screw it, let the rework department down the line deal with it. I’m not eating a downtime hit to my name.”