5S Supply Blog

Monday Morning Message on Lean – July 26, 2010

I thought it would be appropriate to have a quote from Henry Ford. His birthday is on Friday, July 30^th.

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford

With what we all have gone through with the economy, many companies didn’t make it, some made it but will be changed forever, others will have gained from this experience and get stronger. One of my favorite sayings about my time in the U.S. Navy is that there are three ways you can come out of the service; 1) worse than you came in, 2) the same as you came in, or 3) better than you came in. The first two take little to no effort; the third requires work.

I think one of the things that comes to mind for me about Henry Ford’s quote is that we should capture Lessons Learned after any type of business endeavor, whether it’s a complete ERP installation, marketing campaign, kaizen event or even a badly run meeting. It can be a formal written document of what worked, what didn’t or what we could do better next time or it can be as simple as honest reflection of what happened. When I work with clients on major projects not only are we tracking what is going on during the project, we have a project close-out too. Members of the project team get to evaluate how we did on the project. This allows us to look at it from a process point-of-view for improvement.

For an example click here>> Project Closeout Example

So even if we didn’t fail, or get the results we expected we can begin again more thoughtfully.