Most leaders, managers and workers are facing enormous pressure to deliver more with less. Much less…people, material, and time. In other words, they need to increase productivity, lower costs, and work at speed. All this without sacrificing quality and without capital investment!

This requires tough, decisive actions. There is a soft side and a hard side to the crisis.

Soft side
The tendency of leaders is to personally assess the situation, come up with a plan of action, and then announce and implement the same. It usually results in downsizing or layoffs.We hear of several large organizations in the news, following this path. Examples abound in the airline, banking and IT sectors. Many more organizations in the medium and small manufacturing and service sectors have resorted to the same.

The above solution may be necessary in some cases, but in many cases such solutions developed independently, in isolation, and at the top, often create more problems than they solve. They fail to involve people in the problem, and therefore, fail to get their best thinking and commitment.

I believe in Juran’s principle: involve people in the problem and work out the solution together. It takes courage to go for a win-win.

The opportunity today is to get authentic and real with people – to have open conversations, to look at the problems and honestly share the issues at hand – and then to listen to people and let their ideas flow. When mutual understanding and respect is present, the spirit of synergy inevitably starts to develop.

Hard side
For the hard side we need to benchmark Japanese manufacturing organizations, post World-War II.

Japan was a shattered economy in the 1940s and 1950s. It had no buying power, negligible natural resources, and poor manufacturing capability; but it had a great desire to survive and succeed.

In this context, the miracle of Toyota is the most outstanding example. They demonstrated with Just-In-Time (JIT) principles that they could address the issues of wasteful inventory costs, and improve their on-time-delivery capability. In fact in the 1970s, post the oil crisis, Toyota led the threat to the American auto industry. The rest is history.

The subsequent evolution of JIT to Toyota Production System (TPS) can best be described as “JIT on steroids”. In western management glossary, it is called Lean Enterprise.

Enterprises in India would do well by adopting TPS or Lean, particularly in the present mega crisis. Armed with these tools, our aim should be to eliminate chunks of non-value-adding work from our sluggish manufacturing and non-manufacturing processes. 80 percent of work is non-value-adding! TPS / Lean can help improve quality, reduce waste, and speed up delivery. This ensures a win-win for the leaders on the one hand, and managers and workers on the other. After all, profits ensure job security.