#2 How enterprise excellence was discovered with Peter Hines, Part 1

This episode, which is part 1 of 2, explores Professor Peter Hines' journey into Enterprise Excellence. Peter Hines has dedicated much of his career on the topic of sustaining improvement journeys within organisations. He has lead and written about organisational change programs focussing on more than just making money. He has helped these organisations achieve improvement for themselves, others and the planet simultaneously. Peter has recently been inducted into the Shingo Academy, a leading organisation in recognising and training on the topics of Enterprise Excellence.  

We explore the events and mentors who helped shape Peter and develop his passion and learnings in organisational change and improvement. Peter shares how his initial introduction into improvement and the importance of systems was studying the natural world as part of his early years at University. Peter shares some of the opportunities that arose through his academic and professional career that shaped his thinking. 

He shares the amazing times he spent with a key mentor of his: Prof Msayoshi Akaida. He shares how the time they spent together driving around the United Kingdom visiting operations and supply chains shaped Peters thinking and potentially frustrated Prof Akaida at times with Peter's abundance of questions. 

Quotes

1.     So, in my last year of the course, I was doing things like urban geography, developing countries, I was doing fluvial geomorphology, and particularly coastal geomorphology. So, you know, as you can see, all of those are really very different in terms of subject and I suppose one of the key things was that it was really in the era where the predominant sort of thinking methodology was around systems thinking. So, I suppose what I was really learning was systems thinking.  

3.     And then I spent three months working with them in Japan, understanding what they did, understanding the supply chain. And really, it was true, you know, they use pretty much half the resources for everything that they did. They were really, really efficient. So, what was interesting for me at the time was to look at the system whereby they worked with the suppliers. 

4.    The two systems that I found that were best in Toyota, were the two main inputs to the business, the people and the components. So, in other words, if you get your inputs right, and you've got pretty reasonable processes internally, you produce fantastic outputs.  

5.     Now, in actual fact, we didn't do that for an economic benefit. We actually did it for risk mitigation, and an environmental benefit. So, the reason we did it was in the UK, there was a lot of legislation coming in, which obviously has come around the world as well, about movement of transport and so forth. 

6.     In other words, what's the really important stuff that I'd seen at Toyota that actually people weren't doing? So, what I'd seen was strategy deployment, leadership, engagement and behaviour.

7.     And by the time like, I'd spent two and a half months there, I actually realized that 'the rigorous and disciplined application of' was actually the most important part of the sentence, and I hadn't even been writing it down, which actually is the culture, the leadership, the behaviour. So, in other words, what they were saying is create the right culture, and have a good improvement methodology. And you'll close the bridge. 

8.     What Peter (Senge) was talking about in the book (The Fifth Discipline) was a learning organization.And I just, it all just fell into place. I said, bingo. That's actually what Toyota had, they ha

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