Do you know the stories behind the Lean Startup? — Issue #2
Human knowledge is sequential: since the second industrial revolution to today we have been able to round out amazing feats.
Entrepreneurs, engineers, inventors: they all have created an exceptional world in just one hundred and fifty years.
They have been able to innovate thanks to the teachings provided by previous experiments and studies obviously.
If you erase the memory of the best inventors in the world and leave them in the middle of a woodland they probably will not be able to cook up anything to survive.
For this reason, in order to understand the Lean Startup, it’s necessary to start from the study of what we now call management, and its creator, Frederick Taylor, father of Scientific Management theory.
In spite of this theory’s veracity, we will only focus on a specific element: Taylor was the first to talk about the division of labor.
Nowadays it is a evident theme that concertizes in the simple idea that if you have to do a very big and difficult task, you need to divide it into a series of individual tasks.
Another person of great importance in our story is Henry Ford, who decided to adopt this theory within his own factory, creating a phenomenon that today we call Fordism and which characterized the industry until the second half of the 900’s .
But what links Taylorism and Fordism of the last century to today’s Lean Startup methodology?
Apparently, nothing.
But if we look deeper we can see that if Taylor didn’t publish The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 and Ford hadn’t applied it by developing the first assembly line probably Taiichi Ohno, forty years later, wouldn’t have been deemed it an inspiration for a a different philosophy, an alternative to the Ford’s mass production: Toyotism.
Leaping forward for more than half a century, Eric Ries in 2011 couldn’t have shaped his prior professional failures to his today’s methodology that perfectly fits neo-businesses run by neo-entrepreneurs (startup) if both Taiichi Ohno bot Hanry Ford wouldn’t have come up with their own.
That said, we try to get more into these theories so to glimpse at a more complete picture of what Lean Startup methodology is, what are its main pillars and, above all, how it can be applied for better future chances at our business.
Taylorism claimed that workers within a company could be always organized scientifically regardless of the company and the market where it operates.
Workers had to simply execute the orders of the superiors fast: in fact, Taylor had put the the company at the center of the theory, forgetting to give importance to people.
As we have already mentioned, Henry Ford has been inspired by the Scientific Management to structure the assembly line within his company in order to increase productivity.
Ford produced an industry within which production is continuous and incessant and products are heaved at a tight pace by exerting a standardized product.
Over time, however, such system became too stern and strict and did not attract any benefit from workers such as technical skills and creativity.
The worker’s alienation in the Taylor-Ford system is so greatly accentuated to consider the worker as a cog in a car, while from a managerial point of view this system entails a huge storage of products in the warehouses; this because, as we have said, the production is continuous.
However, in the second post-war period in Japan, a new framework of innovation emerged that brought to light a new way of producing.
In fact, Toyota was in such a serious lack of resources due to the defeat of his country during World War II that production therefore could not rely on offer as stated by the Taylor-Ford system.
It was therefore declared that a system based on the demand and the continuous improvement of the product and of the production itself would have been the best bet to avoid bankruptcy.
From a push-based production systems, that is, the presence of finished products in the warehouse waiting to be sold, to a pull-based production system, the production of products that have already been sold or which is expected to sell in a short time.
The Just-in-time born as a new production method.
Taiichi Ohno, Toyota’s director, married this theory completely, increasing the flexibility of his company, so as to allow a production in a short time based on logic pulls, more adaptive to market changes.
Toyota Production System: this is what it would have been called later.
Also, a revaluation of the worker, involving them in production, was crucial; each of them worked in teams, ran more production processes, developing more than a single professional figure.
We had to wait until the 1990’s to hear the term Lean Production through the book The Machine That Changed the World by James Womack and Daniel Jones.
The two authors, in fact, have analyzed and compared the production system of the Toyota with other automakers, deeming it’s superiority a reality.
But what are the main features of Lean Production?
While the Scientific Management sees the increase of productivity as its main goal, the Lean Production has redefined it as its own purpose by maximizing value for customers.
If this can be a bit confusing, let me explain: the value from the customer viewpoint can be defined as something that he really is willing to pay.
As a second goal, finally, the Lean Production fight for the cancellation of “waste”, where they indicate any part or feature of the a product that does not add value, and so, for which the customer is not willing to pay.
In the Lean Production, the customer is at the centre of the system, not the company.
Photos by Redd Angelo, Felipe Santana, Samuel Zeller, Sabri Tuzcu.
