Office Kaizen 2: Harnessing Leadership, Organizations, People, and Tools for Office Excellence

Expanding upon what Office Kaizen: Transforming Office Operations into a Strategic Competitive Advantage presented this book continues to forego dependence upon good fortune and completes the picture of what s required for a comprehensive sustainable Office Kaizen implementation. The purpose is to provide predictable defined structures and methods to replace circumstance and luck in the pursuit of excellence. The specific objectives that Office Kaizen 2 pursues in order complete the road map to kaizen success are: Provide leadership at all levels with an understanding of how human motivation and group and organization dynamics influence what everyone does every minute at work. Provide leadership at all levels with an understanding of what cultural change is and how it can be most effectively led. Present and explain why how and when the principle methods and tools of Office Kaizen can best be applied. Provide guidance for planning conducting and following-up on continuous improvement events (sometimes called rapid improvement events kaizen blitzes and so on). Present detailed approaches for leading kaizen-based cultural change initiatives at various levels of organizations from single work groups to corporate wide efforts. Provide insights into applying value stream mapping (VSM) in non-factory settings. An organization that effectively utilizes kaizen (and/or lean manufacturing and/or Six/lean Sigma) methods over the long term as a normal part of everyday business is one that has dramatically changed its culture from what it was before. The fact that so many organizations fail in implementations of world-class methods suggests that many of the successes are based upon happenstance or luck. This book provides the guidelines for method and tool applications that take the luck out of successful Office Kaizen cultural change initiatives.