ABSTRACT
Nearly every organization that embraces lean has a burning platform, inflection point, or whatever you want to call it-that moment that forces radical change (kaikaku) from long-held behaviors. Goodyear too had such a moment in early 2000 (and others since). Business conditions at that time helped push the R&D organization toward an awareness of what today we would call “lean” and learning about and pursuing lean practices. The start of our lean initiative was helped by reasonably sound change-management and project-management systems that were already in place, the key characteristics of which are described in this chapter. But even more important than understanding the systems that helped Goodyear facilitate change are the lessons that we learned when we truly started with lean, when we began to see our processes through a lean lens (i.e., value-stream mapping) and apply lean changes. We ran into many obstacles that probably exist in your company and every organization-functional optimization, outdated processes, and a flat-out refusal by some to participate. We overcame it all.
