Originally published by Mark Graban on LinkedIn: How Military Leadership & Lean Come Together to Create "Leadersights"
On episode 273 of the Lean Blog Podcast, my guest was David Veech, author of the soon to be published Leadersights: Creating Great Leaders Who Create Great Workplaces, who is currently working as both Senior Consultant at Honsha and as a Senior Lecturer for The Ohio State University in the Master of Business Operational Excellence (MBOE) program.
David first heard about Lean from a professor while earning a Master of Science in Industrial Management at Clemson University via the U.S. Army.
“But he was talking about it as if it were some theoretical little game that professors can play with,” David said. “I was like no, no, no, that is exactly what I’ve been trying to do through my military career, to make things flow as quickly as possible so we can get in, move fast, strike hard, finish rapidly, the whole works. So it all resonated with me.”
After graduation, the Army sent David into a buying command, where he built relationships with defense contractors who were applying Lean thinking to their processes. When David entered his last position with the Army, at the Defense Acquisition University at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, he noticed the production, quality, and manufacturing career field for the government service did not teach Lean. He brought this up with his boss and teaching partner, which led to David setting to work on building a Lean curriculum into the program.
David’s military background has influenced his approach to Lean thinking in many ways. The most significant lessons that David carried from his career in the military into his work on Lean was about leadership. David explained that he was given a large amount of responsibility very early in his career, which looking back now he realizes was a bit overwhelming. At the same time, David was working with various types of leaders, both good and bad.
During our conversation, David picked out one person he worked under for just 15 months as the type of leader that exemplified the type of leadership that he speaks about in his new book.
“For the first year, God, I hated working for this guy. He was meticulous."
"He would ask me to write up a training plan, I’d send it over to him and he would bring it back dripping with red ink. But he would sit down and he would tell me everything that I’d misunderstood or miscommunicated or ways that things were rough. And then he would say, “Ok, now give it another shot.” It was very frustrating at the time, as I was working long hours and everything else, but I didn’t realize how much I was learning,” David said. “I found out from other people, that my boss, the one who was making all my papers bleed, was presenting them [to the brigade commander] as if they were first drafts of mine. So he didn’t take any credit for anything that he did. That has stuck with me."