אמזון והניהול הרזה

באחד הפוסטים הקודמים הבאתי את הסיפור של ג'ף בזוס מנכ"ל אמזון. מה שהוא עשה בנושא ה 5WHYs בא לו באופן טבעי כי אמזון פועל באופן הדוק בניהול רזה וגם ב 6 סיגמא. זו חלק מהאסטרטגיה הניהולית של אמזון. לא רק בתפעול אלא בכלל החברה. לדבריו של ג'ף בזוס, זה אחד הדברים שנתנו להם יתרון תחרותי רציני על פני המתחרים.
הינה מספר ציטוטים מכתב וראיון עם ג'ף בזוס, שהתפרסמו ב Harvard Business Review:

As the business grew and moved into new areas, you must have felt challenged to keep up on a personal level. What have you had to learn along the way?

"Something we haven’t talked about, but that is super important in our culture, is the focus on defect reduction and execution. It’s one of the reasons that we have been successful for customers. That is something I had to learn about."

That’s not your natural strength?

"Well, by “learn” I
mean I literally learned a bunch of techniques, like Six Sigma and lean manufacturing and other incredibly useful approaches. I’m very detail oriented by nature, so I have the right instincts to be an acceptable operator, but I didn’t have the tools to create repeatable processes and to know where those processes made sense.
Before I started Amazon, I was with a quantitative hedge fund. That work is very disciplined and very analytical, but it’s not a question of designing a repeatable process. It’s not like a car-manufacturing plant, where the work has to be done in a defect-free way, in the same way over and over and over—or anyway, that piece of it is not as important. But here, that execution focus is a big factor, and you can see it in our financial metrics over the past ten years. It’s very obvious when, for instance, we look at the number of customer contacts per unit sold. Our customers don’t contact us unless something’s wrong, so we want that number to move down—and it has gone down every year for 12 years. That’s big-time process management. We try to implement those kinds of processes in various places. They’re most naturally applied in our fulfillment centers and in customer service and so on, but we’ve actually found that they can be useful in a bunch of different things.
When you are inexperienced with disciplined process management, you initially think that it’s equivalent to bureaucracy. But effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless processing—and we’ve had some of that, too."

להזכירכם, אמזון אינה חברת רכבים, אינה חברה תעשייתית, היא חברה למכירת ספרים ומוצרים נוספים, הפועלת דרך האינטרנט ומספקת באופן פיזי.
מה אתם חושבים על דבריו של ג'ף בזוס? האם אתם מסוגלים לראות את הנהלת החברה שלכם דורשת בנחישות את יישום הניהול הרזה? ומה אתם יכולים לעשות כדי שזה יקרה?