The Just Don't Get It!

Chapter 2: A Cultural Pulse Check Here’s something we’ve learned after visiting countless plants: you can read the culture of a facility in minutes. It shows up in the basics—is there an obvious commitment to safety? Is the place clean and well lit? Is 5S being practiced faithfully? It shows up in the workarounds—cardboard, duct tape, zip ties, and handwritten signs taped to the machines or breakroom walls. Those quick fixes aren’t just about keeping machines running; they tell you a lot about whether problems get solved or just patched over. It shows up in what’s visible: real-time displays and dashboards that mean something, versus charts and graphs stuck on a wall that are old, irrelevant, or just ignored. How about those whiteboards that haven’t been updated in days or weeks? And maybe most of all, it shows up in the way leaders and teams interact with each other and with other functional areas. Do you see respect, camaraderie, authenticity? Or is it stiff, distant, going through the motions? Put all that together and you get the real story of a plant. Why This Matters Before You Start Before you try to adopt the principles in this book, you need to understand your starting point. Culture either

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