Track What Matters. Be Transparent and Inclusive.
​I’ve had a huge opportunity to learn from experienced lean and operations thinkers who I’ve met and interviewed over the past 12 years. After a while you start to see patterns, particularly when talking to them about their second or third runs at implementing a lean management system, and trying to unlearn top-down, command-and-control leadership behaviors. 
As a firm, we have learned from these individuals while trying to help improve the performance of our own operations at Stiles Associates. We have a tremendous amount of variation and resistance to standard work. After pushing standardization with limited success, we decided to start tracking and sharing high-level delivery metrics (lead time and other indicators of productivity).  

We now have a visual management board in our office and share weekly metrics with the team. Simply doing this let us have a better understanding of what is actually happening in the operations and where we need to focus and provide support.  

We also stopped pushing standards and asked the team to help address the performance gaps via value-stream mapping and kaizen events. This helped us realize that certain things we had always done were non-value-added. For instance, we discovered that writing long, expository candidate reports were not valued by our clients and created an unnecessary burden on our team to produce.  

​It is all a process of trial and error but along the way we’ve had better overall results and more valuable conversations as an organization about the barriers to continued improvement.

​Work on the Right Things, One at a Time
There are busy people and productive people. Busy people always talk about how busy they are. Productive people get things done.

As a marketer, it’s easy to be busy. We all have a to-do list a mile long that reflects all of the things we could do. To be productive you need to identify the right things to work on instead of moving from one shiny idea to the next.

As Joe Pullizi [founder of CMI] once remarked to me, we need to be like “a horse with blinders.” Know what you want to accomplish, get laser-focused, and then knock them off our list one-by-one.

I’m in the midst of starting a new business. We have a plan for how we want to grow and what we want to be known for. 

Robert Martichenko is founder and CEO of LeanCor Supply Chain Group. He is a frequent conference speaker, a poet and author of several business books and a novel. For this series about the crossover wisdom between work and life we talked about how his creative side and his professional life have come together, leading by example and how problem solving can build respect. ​

​All In: Bring Your Whole Self to Work and Life
​I believe I was touched by the muses. My novel Drift and Hum poured out of me. It’s 193,000 words and I never once stared at the screen and asked, “Now, what am I going to write today?” The only reason it took so long to write was because of my slow typing.

If you read my novel, there are two story lines. One is about the boys growing up and the other one is about Sam at 50 years old. It is a book of fiction, but a lot of it is fairly autobiographical.

When I decided that I would self-publish it, I was worried about LeanCor. I have a brand. I’m known as a lean thinker and business owner in the supply chain industry, which is fairly conservative. If I negatively impacted the company somehow, that would be very bad.

I was going to use a pseudonym; I came up with “Hunter Karmack.” Then some friends asked me, “What are you doing? Be proud of the different depths that you have as a person.” I’m a business owner. I write business books, I wrote the novel and I also write poetry. And I have a degree in mathematics.
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