Me too!
This is dead-on. When the president of my former company joined the cult he stocked the Continual Improvement department with whoever he could find that would buy into it - and if you didn’t, you were out. High-level decisions are now made by individuals with frankly weak educational and technical backgrounds - but they blindly apply the Holy Process to whatever problem is at hand, and the result is assumed to be infallible.
I remember one particular comapny-wide meeting - we had recently had a large reduction, were losing money, and hadn’t turned out a new product in couple of years ( incredibly enough, though, we had a Kaizan that produced a process whereby we could crank out anything in 9 months ). The president rallied us by playing a clip from a Rocky movie, then went through the ususal power-point eye charts resulting from the planning sessions with the consultants.
He then explained that on leaving the meeting room, we would all recieve a “Bus Ticket”. It had a place to write on it if you were “On The Bus” or not - meaning were you buying into the Lean-Sigma cult or not. I figured the guy never had an original thought in his life, so the first thing I did was Google “On The Bus” - sure enough, the whole charade was right out of one of the Lean manifesto books.
So sad. People were leaving in droves. We were told that the president was working on an Employee Retention Plan. When it was presented to us, it turned out to be nothing more than sending managers to EQ training. ( EQ turned out to be emotional intelligence or some such thing ).
It’s really shocking what the whole thing has done to the company - it’s failing quickly.
That’s so sad…
That I thought sword fighting was cool, or that the book was in the business section?
Eh…probably both. Yeah…I’m a geek. ; ^ )
No, no, just the business section part…