Your people are going around and around your operations chasing solutions to reduce costs and improve performances, but they are not achieving the targets. They try a lot of little stuff here and there, a lot of fluff, and sometimes they are convinced that only by spending millions they can get the improvements the operations are craving. So the time pass, money is spent, results are not coming, and the plant goes into jeopardy. What’s wrong? Usually: too many voices, some louder than others, no commonsense, no industrial philosophy, and first of all, no genuine willingness to challenge the existing set-up. They are locked in their box of misleading perceptions. IT’S THEIR PERCEPTIONS AND BEHAVIORS Many managers and middle managers usually do not know too much about what it means to manage operations with a lean thinking approach. They never had management teachings. At the university, no professor teaches how to manage; they teach the what but seldom the how; however, no professor is usually qualified. Managers don’t know that they have to visit their processes with a clinical eye regularly; when they do what we call a Gemba walk, it’s only for a few minutes because they have another urgent meeting. They think to understand problems and lead their people through charts and reports interpretation, but these bring to: Misunderstanding: the whole puzzle, the problems, and the possibles solutions Loss of the right angle to interpret the reality of the operations These two points explain the causes for missing the targeted performance but not the root cause. The root cause is that they don’t have a consistent management approach of any type, so they start the day in a random mode, funneled by many pre-scheduled meetings in which they speak about the data, but they don’t work on them. LACK OF MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY FORD, TAYLOR, DEMING, OHNO, TOYODA, WELCH, JOBS, BEZOS, etc. They had great management results because of their companies' management school and the integ