It's a Vertically
Managed World
Jim Womack

We live in a world where everything is oriented vertically, departments, functions, enterprises and, very important, individuals, despite the fact that the flow of value to the customer is horizontal across all the departments, functions and enterprises. And - here’s the really odd part—every manager and employee touching the value stream knows intuitively, just below the surface, that value flows horizontally and that customers have no interest at all in the vertical constraints interrupting the flow.

So what’s the problem? Why is it so hard for us to act horizontally rather than just work around (or simply ignore) the enormous problems of being vertical?

The problem begins with you and me. We are all points along the stream, standing tall in our own estimation and our first objective is to optimize ourselves, our own point! Given this, it’s not surprising that we first seek to optimize our department (where our boss, our personnel evaluation and our career path reside) and then our function and then, maybe, our enterprise, with no energy left over for optimizing the whole stream.

But let’s not be too hard on ourselves. Our personal objectives, compensation and career trajectories strongly direct us to look up, for fear of falling down, rather to look from side to side in hopes of doing better. We aren’t so much bad people - at least I’m not! - but good people working in a bad management process. However, unless we can devise a new framework for thinking together about the horizontal flow of value in a way that makes everyone better off, we will all continue to act as we always have. The predictable result is frustrating work lives and an exasperating experience for customers.

The most fundamental issue in management is how to think horizontally in our inherently vertical organizations.

It's a Vertically
Managed World
Jim Womack

Think Horizontal

The most fundamental issue in management is how to think horizontally in our inherently vertical organizations. Making the switch from vertical to horizontal thinking requires a big change in what we do. In order to reorient your thinking from vertical to horizontal, you need to take a Gemba walk.

The Japanese term Gemba or “actual place” denotes the location where value is created for customers. Most executives and managers think their job is to solve problems. That’s impossible because they are too far removed from the process they are observing. Instead, executives and managers should be guided by the saying, “go see, ask why, show respect.”

Talk to the people who are doing the actual work; look at what’s really happening right now; ask people about the purpose of the work; look at each step in the process. And, as you talk to people, you begin to see whether they are engaged or not, whether they have a way to deal with problems or not, whether they are being trained in a way that will help them make a better process or not and whether there is a process for creating the next generation of process managers or not. By the time you get to the end, what you’ve seen probably is indicative of what’s going on in the rest of the organization.

To succeed you’ll need to raise consciousness, create the vision, highlight the problems to be overcome, identify the costs of improvement along with the benefits and find a way to offset the costs to achieve a positive sum solution.

The most fundamental issue in management is how to think horizontally in our inherently vertical organizations.