broken up and the assets sold off rather than continuing as a company, would
your leaders do it? Would they be fulfilling the purpose of the company by dis-
solving it and selling off the pieces?
From a pure market-economics perspective they should dissolve the com-
pany and sell it off. Of course, one could argue that it depends on the terms
being considered. Perhaps with a change in strategy the company could be
more profitable in a 10-year period compared to dissolving it. Or perhaps one has
to look out 15 years. But the time period is not the issue. The issue is: Why does
the company exist? If it is purely a financial endeavor, it could achieve its pur-
pose by being profitably dissolved and sold off based on risk-reward calculations
over some time horizon. If the company exists for other reasons, then selling it off,
even at a tidy profit, may be admitting failure.
If Toyota were broken into pieces and sold off at a handsome profit, it would
be an utter failure based on its purpose. It could not continue to benefit society,
let alone its internal associates or external partners, if it were dissolved as a
company. It would only benefit a few individual owners in the short term. This
is an important fact as a foundation for building a lean learning enterprise because
it leads to the fundamental question: What is it worth investing to achieve the
purpose of the company? For every business transaction this question will come
to the fore. For every investment in improving the company, its people, and its
partners, this question will loom large. In fact, if you can’t answer this question,
it may not be worth learning to be lean. You might want to pull a few of the lean
tools out of the lean bag of tricks and map your process, eliminate some waste,
and grab the cost savings. But you won’t become a lean learning enterprise by
taking that path. And most of the good advice and tips in this book will not
apply to your company. Read a book on financial analysis instead.
So at some point you need to face the tough question: Why do we exist as a
company? It need not be an abstract, unanswerable, philosophical debate. In this
chapter we discuss a way of thinking about your company’s purpose and some
tips on what it takes to develop the foundation for building a lean learning
enterprise.
A Sense of Purpose Inside and Out
What does it mean for an organization to have a sense of purpose? If it’s simply
to make money, put a big dollar sign on a poster for the employees and man-
agers to see and forget the elaborate mission statement. If it’s more than that,
you should consider what you’re trying to accomplish both internally and exter-
nally. What are you trying to build for your internal stakeholders? What are you
trying to help them contribute, and what will they get in return? What impact
are you trying to have on the outside world? Furthermore, your mission should
have two parts—one part about people and the other about the business.