Pros
1. You’ll meet a lot of good people who genuinely care and are trying to do real work in spite of the system. Their resilience is the only thing holding the place together. 2. If you want to see how corporate Lean becomes corporate theater, this place is a masterclass. Perfect if you enjoy watching maturity models get celebrated while nothing changes at the actual gemba. 3. Fantastic exposure to how much energy a company can put into protecting a narrative instead of fixing its problems. 4. The prework process is incredible. You’ll spend hours preparing slide decks for pre-meetings to review the actual pre-read that will later be reviewed in the real meeting. If you ever wanted to live inside a never-ending loop of “alignment,” this is your chance. It's Inception and Groundhog Day all rolled into one remarkably bad movie that never ends. 5. You’ll get to watch a French DBS leader run “gemba coaching” from a windowless room somewhere in the English countryside while trying to dictate changes to factories thousands of miles away. It’s almost impressive how detached it gets.
Cons
1. Leadership has no real appetite for problem solving. They want sanitized data, green bowlers, and a good story to present. Anything that threatens the narrative gets politely ignored or reframed. 2. The entire system rewards people who protect appearances, not people who do hard work. If you challenge bad decisions or call out gaps, you quickly find yourself outside the circle. 3. "Reducing variation" has been a strategic priority for three years. In that time, not one major variation reduction project has been started, resourced, or completed. It was never a real goal. It was a slogan. First, they tried to reduce it and didn't know where to start. Second, they tried to "embrace and lean into it" and that didn't work either. They will do everything but actually take the first step. Ask anyone about their famous "Mold Allocation MAtrix". Bye MAMA. 4. The Business System has become a parody of itself. All the language, none of the substance. The “DBS maturity” scores are an absolute joke, disconnected entirely from reality. 5. Certification paths and capability development are performative at best. Your career growth here is based on how willing you are to support the performance, not your actual skills or contributions. They talked about making Equipment Reliability and Uptime a Strategic Goal, and then RIF'd me, the guy that was the Advanced Certified Practitioner of Total Productive Maintenance about 2 weeks prior to me launching the biggest overhaul of Danaher's TPM content in 25 years. 5. Watching highly capable CI leaders get RIF’d while the coaching bench sits thousands of miles away is demoralizing. While preaching about going to gemba, they keep the armchair DBSL's working from home, while RIF'ing the ones that came to the site every single day throughout the pandemic and beyond. 6. If you believe in real Lean, the kind that respects people, confronts problems, and builds capability, this environment will burn you out. STAY FAR AWAY. If you like clown circus and shit-shows, go for it.