ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the requirements for success in the food service and construction industries. Like most people who work in kitchens, construction people are fiercely independent, view themselves as creative problem solvers, and relish the challenge of pulling off the impossible every day. From a Lean perspective, it is crucial to understand both a restaurant's and job site's failure points. Both construction projects and restaurants fail or succeed for similar reasons that are rooted in Lean principles, yet differ from typical manufacturing operations. Like restaurants, job sites are loaded with colorful characters, most of whom are insanely passionate about what they do. To say the least, job sites and kitchens are highly dynamic places. Both restaurant and construction managers tend to be overly enamored with their subordinates' technical abilities and tend to overlook their potential "team-killing" behaviors in deference to the highly specialized products they are capable of producing.
