Highlights
Whether you’re a CEO or a first line supervisor, this workshop will help you understand your role in lean journey as well as how to see the warning signs of failure while there is still time to make corrections. It will also provide tips and group interactions you can take away and apply when you get home. Class size is limited to 20 attendees so register early!
Overview
Companies start down the road towards operational excellence with the best of intentions. Unfortunately, about four out of five companies who start this journey find themselves in the side ditch, spinning their wheels, in less than five years’ time. Surveys over the last 30 years paint the same picture over and over again. Company leaders stand before their employees and exhort them to excel. Most then delegate “the program” and return to doing their jobs the same way they’ve been doing them for years. They don’t fully understand the journey they’ve launched nor are they truly committed to the long-term nature of it. In short, they send the message that the job of continuous improvement execution rests in manufacturing, and go on attending to “more important things” in the C-suite. In short, they don’t “walk the talk."
Like most things in any organization, it’s all about leadership!—transformational leadership! Do you have a leadership crisis in your company? Do you or other leaders in your company lack understanding of your role as a leader of this revolution to achieve and sustain excellence? How comprehensive is the training provided for employees, top to bottom, to ensure each understands and is equipped to play their position effectively? Is operations leadership strong enough to initiate the revolution, and then manage up, using improved performance as the way to win boardroom support?
Presenter: Larry E. Fast
Larry Fast is founder and president of Pathways to Manufacturing Excellence, LLC, and a veteran of 35 years in the wire and cable industry, 25 years as the senior operations and supply chain leader of multiple facilities. He is the author of the best seller, "The 12 Principles of Manufacturing Excellence: A Leader's Guide to Achieving and Sustaining Excellence," which was published in October, 2011 by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, as a Productivity Press book. In September, 2015, a second edition was published with a new Chapter 1 on leadership, various updates of anecdotes, and new electronic tools on the accompanying CD.
At Belden Wire & Cable Company, where he spent his first 25 years, Fast conceived and implemented a strategy for manufacturing excellence that substantially improved manufacturing quality, service and cost. He joined General Cable Corporation in 1997 and, as the senior vice president of North American operations and a member of the corporate leadership team, he led the initiative for continuous improvement. The 12 Principles and the accompanying Manufacturing Excellence Audit were used to transform the culture and substantially improve performance. By 2001, the first General Cable plant had won Top 25 recognition as one of the Industry Week Best Plants. By his retirement in 2007, General Cable manufacturing plants had been recognized for multiple Industry Week “Best Plants in North America” winners and a number of finalists that later won the big prize. Fast holds a Bachelor of Science degree in management and administration from Indiana University and is a graduate from Earlham College’s Institute for Executive Growth. He also completed the program for management development at the Harvard University School of Business in 1986. He was an AME Southeastern Region director for 10 years holding various leadership positions. He resides in Gainesville, Ga.
