A comment on a Lean article

So our blog group said we were going to write about industry articles we find that can be tied back to LFM.  I have s-t-r-u-g-g-l-e-d with this greatly.  I don't read the news and outside of school the only message boards I read have the maturity level of a 13 year old boy.  What can I say?  Idiots are my people.  Spend 10 minutes at lolcats and you will see where I am coming from.  The other content from the message boards I read is NOT appropriate for this blog.  I guess I have to grow up eventually, but I'm not there yet.

So I was perusing Forbes.com and I ran across this article

Forbes article on Lean and the Army

We had a lean class this summer and so many LFM members are supply chain focused so this article jumped off the page at me.  I read the article and I saw a theme that was common during our lean class looking at the "pop culture" of lean.  When people use the word lean, they associate it with the tools and barely mention the (I'm going to use a dirty word in my lean class) culture.  The most that I saw in the article that was NOT about the tool set was

"formed process-improvement teams supported by analysts and championed by top leaders"

When I think lean the first thing that comes to my mind is a self-correcting and a learning culture.  My favorite analogy is the human body and the way white blood cells work or how DNA repairs itself if an error is made in copying.  I'm just skimming the analogy but I'm not here to talk about that.  The point is, the army has borrowed a good process from Wal-Mart and have been successful with it, but are they capable of taking it beyond that model...of improving on it?

As far as the supply chain aspect of this article goes, I did find it interesting and relevant to the LFM program.  While I am much more interesting in what I call "operations" (as in running a factory) but MANY members of the LFM are supply chain focused and I think they would find this article interesting.