ABSTRACT
A Lean company embraces both extremes across a number of dimensions at the same time: short-term AND long-term, exploitation AND exploration, standard AND innovation, robust AND agile, jidoka AND Just-in-Time, etc. Frontloading resources to enable knowledge to develop more quickly and make better decisions later changes the expense curve. So, this requires trust from the management, but it pays off in the long run. Generally speaking, ‘bureaucracy’ is perceived as a form of organisation. It has become necessary to ensure the functioning of increasingly important structures and did not originally carry the negative connotation of ‘red tape’ that is now associated with its excesses. Mechanistic bureaucracy imposes a series of detailed rules and regulations fixed in a kind of ‘command and control’ model and applied uniformly in all cases. Enabling bureaucracy proposes continuously improved guidelines and standards in a learning model. This way develops critical thinking, collaboration, and responsibility for everyone.
