"WHEN THE EMPLOYEES ARE THE OWNERS, and they are charting the course, essential business priorities change,” says John Abrams, founder of South Mountain Co. "Improving the community where we live and raising our families become part of our basic priorities. ”At South Mountain— a 30-year-old, $6 million architecture and construction firm on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts— business is about more than growth and profit. As Abrams explains in his book, The Company We Keep, South Mountain is about workplace democracy, challenging the gospel of growth, balancing multiple bottom lines, celebrating craft, committing to place, and thinking like cathedral builders. Read more...

Lean challenges the traditional belief that there needs to be a trade off between time, cost, and quality. In fact, lean challenges just about every existing belief and business practice you may have in your organization. Lean does this through the following methods: by focusing on doing nothing that doesn’t deliver value to the customer and eliminating any waste from that process (no small undertaking in itself), focusing on the people who add value (employees, suppliers, etc.), having the value flow only from demand, and optimizing all across the organization.

Green Building practices normally encompass the environmental and economic aspects of building. And when we talk about greening a business we think of people carpooling to work, recycling paper, or some way of being more friendly to the environment. But what about the social aspect of green? What would it look like to consider the human aspect of Green? What if we applied the same thinking we have in Lean to the social aspect of Green?

What you might get are practices that consider what’s going to work best for the employee. And since they are your most valuable resource, the results we get could be important. What we hear from companies like South Mountain are that the results are counter-intuitive in that, where you expect things might get more difficult, it’s actually easier. What you lose in control, you gain in freedom. And when you expect things to take longer to accomplish as a whole you find levels of productivity you never even dreamed possible. This is what we see exemplified at Toyota, whose practices have been a tradition for over 50 years. I predict companies like John Abrams’ South Mountain are breaking new ground for the rest of us to follow.

One Million. That’s how many ideas Toyota implements each year. Do the math: 3000 ideas a day. That number, more than anything else, explains why Toyota appears to be in a league all their own, playing offense on a field of innovation, while their competitors remain caught in a crossfire of cost-cutting.

Here’s the thing: it’s not about the cars. It’s about ideas. And the people with those ideas. But not just any ideas. Mostly tiny ones, but effective ones nonetheless—elegant solutions to real world problems. Not grand slam homeruns, but groundball singles implemented all across the company by associates that view their role not to be simply doing the work, but taking it to the next level…every day, in some little way. Good enough never is. When an entire organization thinks like that, it becomes unstoppable. Read more...