LEAN this!

Is LEAN the most fucked-up thing to happen to the U.S. Navy sailor since they took away our grog, or is it just me? I studiously avoided attending their indoctrination classes for years, but today fate caught up with me. There's four hours I'd rather have been scrubbing shitters.

For some reason it took four instructors to teach the class, and all four were continuously in the room. They had one of 'em just hitting the "enter" button on the laptop to advance the PowerPoint presentation, while another did the talking. Here's LEAN suggestion number one: buy a freaking wireless mouse and join the twenty first century, you masters of efficiency! Actually, as it turns out, all four of them are trained to pounce on (and stifle) any criticism as a team. Maybe that's why they give them combative titles like "green belt".

The training starts out with a completely BS "exercise" designed to be as inefficient as possible. Even if everyone in the class can recognize how screwed up it is right off the bat, the LEAN people still make you act it out, wasting about an hour of everyone's time. How else can they demonstrate the superiority of THEIR god if they don't show you how much you need their help?

After Contrived Exercise #1, they allow your class to discuss ways of improving performance, while they sit back and smirk at your feeble attempts. They've run this drill a million times, so they know all sorts of tricks you couldn't think up in the short amount of time they give you to do so. But, to stack the deck even further, they leave out some information as well. In our case, they just flat out lied to us about what our objectives were.

We run the exercise again, and dramatically improve efficiency (by their standards, anyway). Even so, what follows is a Bataan Deathmarch of a presentation, which is a mix of common-sense crap that's been around forever (like the idea of drawing outlines of all the tools hanging on a pegboard, which is something my Grandpa did) with a sprinkle of self-congratulatory masturbation that makes you think you're really at a Scientology recruitment seminar.

Finally, we run the exercise again, only this time "their way". This time through, they tell you all sorts of stuff they forgot to mention the first two times, like how many products you're actually supposed to be making. They also dramatically reduce the "acceptance criteria" for said product, thus virtually assuring "their way" is the most efficient. (Oddly enough, their own calculation showed that we had improved the efficiency almost twice as much BEFORE the training as they did with their techniques after it. I pointed this out, to the amusement of my team).

While we were instructed to remain "open minded" to new ideas at the start of the class, none of the folks teaching it were leading by example. At the start of the third exercise, I had this lively conversation with one of the teachers:

Her, to me: "Would you like to be the Water Spider" [The person running around handing out supplies]

Me: "No."

Her: "Why don't you want to be the Water Spider?"

Me: "Since we know this time around how many we're making, why don't we just hand out enough supplies beforehand?"

Her, firmly: "The question I asked was 'Do you want to be the Water Spider?' ".

Me: "No."


Which was pretty much how the whole class went. If they detected even a little criticism, all four of the bastards would gang up on you until you shut up (and it took all four to shut ME up). They most definitely did not like me pointing out the obvious flaws in their proof-of-concept exercise, and that nothing in the training between the second and the third exercise would lead you to make all the improvements they made. It was just advertising, pure and simple.


You know, Admiral Rickover hated management systems, and frequently said so. I'm not actually as close-minded, but I've yet to see a management system that applied to something other than an assembly line... and if you need a management system to figure out how to make widgets a little faster, you're a retard and no management system will save you. They have yet to show me how LEAN has anything to do with being a nuc, and became downright hostile today when I asked for that very information.

I subscribe to Admiral Rickover's management system: Work hard, do your fucking job as a chief (or first or whatever), and you'll figure out all on your own how to improve. It isn't rocket science, or even nuclear physics.