Leaders have to deal with strategic management in times of crisis. Current company strategies emphasize the use of continuous improvement, lean management, as a key success factor.
They seek to mitigate the threats associated with the crisis. They are also looking for a relevant management control tool to measure the impact of continuous improvement actions. They find in lean manufacturing a powerful process improvement instrument.
Many articles and studies deal with the topic of strategy, innovation, management, Lean and management control. Academic research in the field is flourishing. Few make the connection between the different areas of business management as a factor in overall performance.
Change
Moreover, how to succeed in leading change when implementing these approaches and how to guide your management style?
Is it the crisis strategy that pushes companies to take an interest in Lean (Frugality) or is it Lean, through its original philosophy of simplification and perpetual improvement, which makes it possible to feed strategies, in particular those aimed at innovation, agility or disruption?
Also, in terms of overall performance management, are there management control matrices applicable to Lean Management to measure their impact?
These questions are fundamentally intertwined, which makes for entrepreneurs, especially those of small and medium-sized structures, the reflection and the task complex because management and change management are jointly contradictory.
How does the academic literature address, or fail to address, this complication?
The Toyota way
There is truly a direct causal link between economic performance and the implementation of an organization inspired by the Toyota Production System (Lean) which has conquered the world in barely a quarter of a century.
The returns of certain companies listed on the stock markets show us that there is a concrete link between the implementation of Lean Management and economic performance: the more the organization is at Lean maturity, the higher the performance.
But if these results are now observable for multinationals, is it possible to transpose this relationship to all economic actors, regardless of their size? Some studies, which even demonstrate the negative side of Lean or Total Quality in certain organizations, are the subject of much debate.
What are the reasons ?
Is it possible to imagine methods that can maximize the probability of success?
What are the organizational strategies adopted by companies in times of major crises?
Lean & Management control
By engaging in a process of continuous improvement and wastes elimination, many companies perceive Lean as the ideal cost reduction strategy to deploy to ensure their sustainability.
However, most of them are embarking on this change without evaluating the operational results. Nonetheless, management control seems to us to be one of the key elements in crisis management by measuring key performance indicators and their evolution.
Given the current state of the art, our objective in this site is to study the management of the strategic transformation of companies in a context of crisis through Lean Management supported by management control tools.
“Kaizen and innovation are the two major strategies people use to create change. Where innovation demands shocking and radical reform, all kaizen asks is that you take small, comfortable steps toward improvement.”
Robert D. Maurer
Happy CEO 