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Frank Walsh entered the car park of the small

factory of Flakt Woods in Warsaw Poland a site employing only 14 people. The old site had been a run down facility, but the new owners had re-housed the team into a beautiful new facility. Frank stared at the layout of the car park & frowned on entering the cold unmanned reception area. Frank was the new European Operations Director & this was his first visit to the site in Poland. On entering the main building he was aghast. They had simply transferred the mess from the old site into the new facility. Frank introduced himself to the General Manager Andrej Cskz and walked him round the site – car park, reception & factory. Then politely but firmly he explained the standard of housekeep-ing that he expected to be seen in 6 weeks time. The outcome in only 4 weeks was a radical im-provement which under his stewardship he knew would be sustained. This was typical of Frank Walsh. He did what was needed quickly & effec-

tively.

Frank was 45 years old – small in stature with a shaven head, but his size masked the per-sonality of a great leader. Frank was arguably one of the best operations managers in the business. Born in UK from Irish parents, Frank was educated to BTech National Diploma status at Stevenage Tech College, where his distinction had been trumped because he was seen by “experts” in top management selection as a failure, because he did

not have a degree.

One of the great dilemmas facing Head Hunters, Recruitment Experts & those whose job is to find the top Operations Managers is where do you find them? Everyone in manufacturing world-wide & even many in the service sector wanted LEAN experts – people who not only had leader-ship skills & the right academic qualification, but also had the necessary LEAN experience to trans-form a traditional company into a LEAN one. LEAN

was in vogue. Every CV from every potential Op-erations Director made sure that LEAN was em-bedded into their resume. Unfortunately the truth was most were followers. They had been taught LEAN, read the books & put their name behind an-ecdotes that could not be verified. In an article for the Association of Manufacturing Excellence (AME), Jim Womack one of the authors of “The Machine That Changed The World” & “Lean Think-ing” (1993 & 1996 respectively) said in letter in June 2010 that the reason LEAN had been so diffi-cult & slow to be sustained was that LEAN compa-nies needed a different sort of manager, a LEAN manager. There lies the dilemma Head Hunters look for experience coupled with academic qualifi-cations while real LEAN leaders find their expertise by doing it in the workplace. The other author of

QUALIFIED TO OPERATE

By Joe Booth, August 2010

Frank Walsh

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the two classic books mentioned above, Dan Jones, wrote in his letter to the AME in June 2010 about the real waste in companies is the waste of

Management

“The fraction of management time that actually re-sults in improvements in the way these organisa-tions create value must be pretty small, dwarfed by the amount of time they spend fighting fires. But, as on the shop floor, they are all good well inten-tioned people trapped in broken and dysfunctional management processes that drive them to do the

wrong things.”

Frank typified the few experienced leaders who had successfully implemented LEAN many times. Being a LEAN manager was not a qualifica-tion, it was a special way of thinking, leading & im-plementing change. A big mistake some head-hunters make is to look for a LEAN manager in a six sigma company where the black-belt is king. When Jack Welch transformed GE in the 90s his tool for transformation was six sigma. As many companies followed GE’s lead thousands of advo-cates were trained in six sigma techniques. One in two hundred employees were selected to be black belts. Their job was to lead major projects full time & reap the benefits. The problem for the head-hunter was that six sigma black belts are not busi-ness leaders. They are specialist project leaders strong on technique, but weak on man manage-ment. Frank was a manager first & a strong busi-

ness leader. LEAN was simply a means to an end.

Frank was a great character. During his stu-dent days he used to supplement his income by submitting scripts to the BBC for comedy shows like, “Not the 9 o’clock news”, “Little & Large” and a “Kick up the 80s”. The pinnacle of his script writing career came in 1984 when in his early twenties he wrote the famous Margaret Thatcher sketch for “Spitting Image” where she refers to her cabinet as vegetables. Imagine his pride when the show won a BAFTA award in 1985 & Frank’s name was in the credits as that skit was highlighted. Frank had a fantastic sense of humour, believing that humour

is a great leveller & can take the sting out of diffi-

cult communications.

Frank’s career was equally as exiting. He started work with Xerox the US giant & after 5 years moved onto Carlton Comelin, a little known manufacturer of hi-tech multi layer pcbs for high profile customers like, Ferranti, Airbus etc. After 3 years he moved to Soundcraft Electronics starting in QA & later Operations Manager. After 4 years in the hot seat he went onto Deltron Electronics as Manufacturing Director then in 2000-2 as Interim Operations Manager for Hawker Siddley Power Transformers. In 2003 Frank was head hunted to Group Improvement Director at Polestar a giant in the printing industry. In all these companies Frank developed his skills as a LEAN manager and

achieved fantastic results.

So what separated Frank from the majority of his peers in Operations? What was so special about him? It was his management style. Frank had the natural ability to effortlessly get the best out of people. But how? First it was his Irish heri-tage, Frank comfortably engaged people at all lev-els. He made them feel valued. He genuinely cared about people & was sincere especially with front line workers. The caring & respect he felt for the common man was counterbalanced by a healthy disrespect for people with power over them – managers. Frank was also a numbers man. When given a target from Executives he would study the way the measure was calculated & measured, but most importantly how it affected be-haviours. If it drove the wrong behaviours it must be changed, if it drove the right behaviours it must be delivered. A good example of this was at Flakt Woods when Frank pushed the productivity meas-ure hard during his first two years, but in Autumn 2009 the company needed cash badly so the measure changed. He ran a workshop with all managers in Operations informing them that “cash was king” & more significantly not productivity. How many managers remove a key measure when implementing a new one? How many managers push for everything & confuse their subordinates? Those who knew Frank well saw him as a man with a reputation to always hit his numbers. So this was the irony, Frank had the soft caring skills of an agony aunt plus the hard tough side being target & numbers driven and most importantly he saw mid-dle managers as both an obstacle to change & the critical factor for its success. Most of all Frank was a disciple of LEAN. It was in his veins & was the best tool in the armoury to transform a business.

He knew because he had done it many times.

How did Frank deal with middle managers? First he would tell them what he expected including the target & timescales. Then he would listen to their response & take this onboard looking for a

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consensus solution. Frank then would monitor their performance closely. Sometimes if all went well and targets were being met Frank would back off having learnt to trust his immediate subordinate. However when it did not Frank would have no hesitation in by-passing the manager. This ap-proach, called skipping, going straight to the team leaders of frontline workers and ask them to report directly to him for a short period of time was very unusual & perceptive. By taking direct control Frank could quickly assess whether the cause of the problem was to do with management, supervi-sion, frontline worker or some other reason. If the root cause was firmly at the feet of the manager he would deal with it quickly. Sometimes this meant taking the manager under his wing or arranging for extra coaching & development. Sometimes it meant more decisive action. Such an approach had served Frank well through Deltron, Hawker Siddley, Polestar & Flakt Woods. This approach meant Frank had developed a tiny group of loyal followers. Joe Kenyon for example had followed Frank from Deltron through most of his career moves. At Flakt Woods Frank’s followers included Joe, Alick Bates, Tony Geary & Loic Jones. Frank’s approach & management style was to cut to the chase and find out quickly if the manager

could do the job?

Frank’s direct reports had tremendous re-spect for him. Some feared him, some loved him. He really did empower them by giving them re-sponsibility with accountability. On reflection Frank would state with passion that most people are very good & the difficulty is motivating them & getting them to perform to the best of their abilities. Frank made getting the best out of people look easy. Most managers do not get the best out of their subordinates. Some people argue that manage-ment is about organisation & control whilst leader-ship is about motivation & inspiration. Frank com-bined the two & this made him special. The out-come of Frank’s approach & management style was a dramatic improvement in business perform-ance wherever he focused his energies. Frank’s style also involved going to where the value was created & where the problems occurred & this was generally on the shop floor. So he was always visi-ble if he was on-site, walking around, talking to people, finding the problems & encouraging people to resolve them. And all this was done in a jovial caring manner. He cared for the people, but

equally cared about performance.

Flakt Woods had come from a merger of two companies. Woods of Colchester had manu-factured Fans for over a hundred years. They had established themselves as the Rolls-Royce of Fans, expensive, but well designed. Flakt was a

well known Scandinavian brand whose Air Han-dlers were well respected especially in their home market. In 2002 the two companies came together with 6 main Scandinavian factories & one UK plant at Colchester. As the group expanded globally other factories in France, Eastern Europe, India & the US were acquired. Corporate strategy was to create a global business with Headquarters in Ge-neva, Switzerland. Obviously rationalisation was

being considered & the UK site was put under the microscope. The Colchester plant was located in the heart of the City Centre adjacent to the main railway station. With commercial property prices souring top management saw a one off opportunity to sell the land & move the factory to a brand new green field site on the outskirts of Colchester. The move went ahead, but the outcome was almost disastrous. It had been badly planned & executed and the site’s operations performance measures for; on time delivery, productivity, quality, safety & morale had nose dived. The situation had been so bad that Woods biggest customer Trane was plan-ning to re-source from a better more reliable Euro-pean source. This was the moment Frank Walsh had been given the job of Interim Operations Man-ager for the new Colchester site. Did a head-hunter contact Frank Walsh to transform Flakt Woods, Colchester, because he was the best leader, manager & expert in LEAN in 2006 No! Frank was asked to be interim Operations Man-ager. The company was in difficulties and needed someone to hold the fort until a real leader would sort out the mess. The reason Frank was not on the radar for the big job was that he did not have a degree. His academic qualification showed that he was good at LEAN & had some useful experience, but was not capable of leading the business trans-formation. Every head-hunter knows that the entry qualification for a top job, someone to transform a difficult & complex business needs a graduate & preferably a Business MBA. The trouble is they are

wrong as Frank Walsh was about to prove.

Frank could not believe the mess when he arrived on his first day at the new Colchester facil-

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ity in April 2006.The layout was wrong, shortages of parts plagued the assembly shop, production plans were in disarray & Sales had informed him that they were on the verge of loosing their biggest customer. Moreover inventory was going through

the roof & EBIT was stuck in the red & dropping week by week. Frank responded the way he al-ways did in a positive & constructive manner. He gained the respect of the workforce & immediately started to improve the areas that needed change. Within weeks the operations key performance indi-cators slowly started to climb. The next priority was Trane the biggest customer. Frank persuaded the Sales Director to take him to France to meet the customer so that he could re-assure them that things would get better immediately. Even Frank with all his persuasion & confidence was shocked at the vitriol voiced by Trane. They were at the end of their tether with the Colchester site. They were in the process of finding another source of supply. The process seemed irreversible. Frank had to summon up vast reserves of persuasion. He agreed to give Trane a 5% price reduction, guaran-tee 100% on time delivery starting next month and guaranteed product quality. To seal the deal he persuaded Trane to put two of their engineers on the Colchester site at the expense of Woods to

oversee the improvement. The desperate attempt worked and they were given one last chance. Now all Frank had to do was to achieve the customer performance targets & more significantly and in

parallel turn the business EBIT from red to black. Trane have now enjoyed 3.5 years of 100% on

time delivery.

Where was the messiah, the new leader whose job was to transform the business? Luckily for Flakt Woods, Colchester, Frank had proven his worth in a very short period of time. He was pro-moted to Manufacturing Director, the big job. What had been achieved for the Trane Cell must be rolled out across the whole site. Frank grabbed the job with relish. He has started to pick his own team from existing people as much as possible. He freed up the good guys & did not let the blockers block. The performance of the company improved

quickly.

The Colchester site with all its tradition had too many board directors making the business slow to change, bureaucratic & difficult to manage. The new owners could see the problem & re-shaped the board to five people at Colchester, a Sales Director, a Finance Director, HR Director, Engineering Director & an Operations Director – Frank Walsh. This helped accelerate the transfor-mation & freed up Frank. Within one year the Col-chester site had changed from being a deep loss-maker into a healthy profitable business. Next Frank had to consolidate the changes. He needed to embed LEAN into the culture. To do so he needed a group of LEAN managers under his

stewardship.

The transformation that occurred in Col-chester during Frank’s second year was as spec-tacular as the first. Productivity, quality, on-time delivery & profit continued to excel. And two years after starting at Flakt Woods Frank’s success was rewarded with a further promotion. He was made Director of Operations for Europe covering all the European sites except the main one at Jonkoping, Sweden with 700 employees, the biggest site in the group. The challenge for him was to repeat what had been done in Colchester at the other sites under his command. The biggest concerns for Frank were the sites at Finland & Sweden so he spent four days out of five in Scandinavia & only one in Colchester. Luckily for him the team at Colchester had started to blossom & the LEAN

transformation progressed.

As in Colchester in the previous years the Scandinavian plants started to perform especially Jarna in Sweden where he had brought in an Ops Mgr from the Automotive Industry with a track re-cord in LEAN. Productivity at the plant increased 15% in 8 months. With 900 employees under his

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wing spread across 6 sites Frank needed a stan-dard approach to implement LEAN to achieve con-sistency & encourage the managers to learn from each others success. He needed a system so he introduced the Flakt Woods Production System (FWPS). At the same time the focus from HQ was to generate more cash than had been budgeted. This was November 2009 in the teeth of the reces-sion. Sales across all sites had been hit by the downturn. So Frank encouraged all his sites to par-ticipate in a special inventory reduction project for one year only. He launched the initiative at a two day conference so all sites heard the common message & sharpened up the Inventory reduction tools in the LEAN toolbox. As mentioned earlier the key to its success was Frank informing everyone that productivity must cease to be the main KPI to be replaced by Inventory reduction. It was so suc-cessful that the Global CEO of Flakt Woods asked Frank to lead a similar project across the FW sites worldwide. The project was called CRI (Cycle Re-duction Initiative) & this spread Frank even more

thinly around. He now had to pay regular visits to India, USA & other sites not under his direct con-trol. By March 2010 the financial performance for the Colchester site was announced and it had achieved 10% EBITDA making it the best perform-ing site in the whole of Flakt Woods equal to 27% of the profit from the group. Not a bad transforma-tion for a site that had been a basket case less

than 3 years before.

At the time of writing of this article in Au-gust 2010 the CRI initiative was two thirds com-plete & on target to beats its inventory reduction goal. Frank had done it again & “The Grown Ups” as he called HQ had given him yet another task – that of Introducing the Lean philosophy around the European sites to ensure the modern managers become Lean Managers. The other jobs he had picked up all remained, Colchester, Europe, CRI worldwide and now direct control of the biggest plant. Frank now had 1600 employees working for him, 3 years earlier he had 400. So what’s the moral of the story? Frank Walsh is an incredible

Ops Director. He has proven it at every step in his career, but he doesn’t have a degree & on paper would not have been selected for the big jobs. Richard Branson, Allan Sugar & others do not have a degree, yet they seem to outperform their peers. Perhaps the magic ingredient that makes people like Frank tick are not taught in universities or business schools & ironically perhaps the peo-ple who are stronger academically are not the best

to transform our companies.

Joe Booth August 2010